I know that place and year well. As is the case with Fletcher – who is one of the last living survivors of the massacre, which took place when she was 7 – the terror of the Tulsa race riot is something that has been with me for almost as long as I can remember. My grandfather, Robert Fairchild, told the story nearly a quarter-century ago to several newspapers.
Here’s how The Washington Post recounted his story in 1996:
“At 92 years old, Robert Fairchild is losing his hearing, but he can still make out the distant shouts of angry white men firing guns late into the night 75 years ago. His eyes are not what they used to be, but he has no trouble seeing the dense, gray smoke swallowing his neighbors’ houses as he walked home from a graduation rehearsal, a frightened boy of 17.
His has since been a life of middle-class comfort, a good job working for the city, a warm family life. But he has never forgotten his mother’s anguish in 1921 as she fled toward the railroad tracks to escape the mobs and fires tearing through the vibrant Black neighborhood of Greenwood in north Tulsa.”
The Washington Post article said the Tulsa race riots of 1921 were among the “worst race riots in the nation’s history.” It reported: “The death toll during the 12-hour rampage is still in dispute, but estimates have put it as high as 250. More than 1,000 businesses and homes were burned to the ground, scores of Black families were herded into cattle pens at the fairgrounds, and one of the largest and most prosperous Black communities in the United States was turned to ashes.”
Riots began after a white mob attempted to lynch a teenager falsely accused of assaulting a white woman. Black residents came to his defense, some armed. The groups traded shots, and mob violence followed. My family eventually returned to a decimated street. Miraculously their home on Latimer Avenue was spared.
Disturbing history
Hearing about these experiences at the family table was troubling enough. Reading a newspaper account of your ancestors’ fleeing for their lives is a surreal pain. There’s recognition of your family’s terror, and relief in knowing your family survived what “60 Minutes” once called “one of the worst race massacres in American history.”
In spite of my grandfather’s witness, this same event didn’t merit inclusion in any of my assigned history texts, either in high school or college. On the occasions I’ve mentioned this history to my colleagues, they’ve been astonished.
In 1996, at the 75th anniversary of the massacre, the city of Tulsa finally acknowledged what had happened. Community leaders from different backgrounds publicly recognized the devastation wrought by the riots. They gathered in a church that had been torched in the riot and since rebuilt. My grandfather told The New York Times then that he was “extremely pleased that Tulsa has taken this occasion seriously.”
“A mistake has been made,” he told the paper, “and this is a way to really look at it, then look toward the future and try to make sure it never happens again.”
That it took so long for the city to acknowledge what took place shows how selective society can be when it comes to which historical events it chooses to remember – and which ones to overlook. The history that society colludes to avoid publicly is necessarily remembered privately.
Economically vibrant
Even with massive destruction, the area of North Tulsa, known as Greenwood, became known for its economic vitality. On the blocks surrounding the corner of Archer Street and Greenwood Avenue in the 1930s, a thriving business district flourished with retail shops, entertainment venues and high-end services. One of these businesses was the Oklahoma Eagle, a Black-owned newspaper. As a teenager in the early 1940s, my father had his first job delivering the paper.
Without knowing the history, it would be a surprise to the casual observer that years earlier everything in this neighborhood had been razed to the ground. The Black Wall Street Memorial, a black marble monolith, sits outside the Greenwood Cultural Center. The memorial is dedicated to the entrepreneurs and pioneers who made Greenwood Avenue what it was both before and after it was destroyed in the 1921 riot.
Although I grew up on military bases across the world, I would visit Greenwood many times over the years. As I grew into my teenage years in the 1970s, I recognized that the former vibrant community was beginning to decline. Some of this was due to the destructive effects of urban renewal and displacement. As with many other Black communities across the country, parts of Greenwood were razed to make way for highways.
Some of the decline was due to the exit of financial institutions, including banks. This contributed to a decrease in opportunities to build wealth, including savings and investment products, loans for homes and businesses, and funding to help build health clinics and affordable housing.
And at least some was due to the diminished loyalty of residents to Black-owned businesses and institutions. During the civil rights movement, downtown Tulsa businesses began to allow Black people into their doors as customers. As a result, Black residents spent less money in their community.
Historical lessons
At the end of my father’s military career in the 1970s, he became a community development banker in Virginia. His work involved bringing together institutions – investors, financial institutions, philanthropists, local governments – to develop innovative development solutions for areas like Greenwood. For me, there are lessons in the experiences of three generations – my grandfather’s, father’s and mine – that influence my scholarly work today.
On the one hand, I study how years after the end of legal segregation Americans remain racially separate in our neighborhoods, schools and workplaces and at alarmingly high levels. My research has shown how segregation depresses economic and social outcomes. In short, segregation creates closed markets that stunt economic activity, especially in the Black community.
On the other hand, I focus on solutions. One avenue of work involves examining the business models of Community Development Financial Institutions, or CDFIs, and Minority Depository Institutions, or MDIs. These are financial institutions that are committed to economic development – banks, credit unions, loan funds, equity funds – that operate in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. They offer what was sorely needed in North Tulsa, and many other neighborhoods across the nation – locally attuned financial institutions that understand the unique challenges families and businesses face in minority communities.
Righting historical wrongs
There are interventions we can take, locally and nationally, that recognize centuries of financial and social constraint. Initiatives like the 2020 decision by the Small Business Administration and U.S. Treasury to allocate US$10 billion to lenders that focus funds on disadvantaged areas are a start. These types of programs are needed even when there aren’t full-scale economic and social crises are taking place, like the COVID-19 epidemic or protesters in the street. Years of institutional barriers and racial wealth gaps cannot be redressed unless there’s a recognition that capital matters.
The 1921 Tulsa race riot began on May 31, only weeks before the annual celebration of Juneteenth, which is observed on June 19. As communities across the country begin recognizing Juneteenth and leading corporations move to celebrate it, it’s important to remember the story behind Juneteenth – slaves weren’t informed that they were emancipated.
After the celebrations, there’s hard work ahead. From my grandfather’s memory of the riot’s devastation to my own work addressing low-income communities’ economic challenges, I have come to see that change requires harnessing economic, governmental and nonprofit solutions that recognize and speak openly about the significant residential, educational and workplace racial segregation that still exists in the United States today.
Today, barn owls, bats, leopards and many other animals rely on their keen senses to live and hunt under the dim light of stars. These nighttime specialists avoid the competition of daylight hours, hunting their prey under the cloak of darkness, often using a combination of night vision and acute hearing.
But was there nightlife 100 million years ago? In a world without owls or leopards, were dinosaurs working the night shift? If so, what senses did they use to find food and avoid predators in the darkness? To better understand the senses of the dinosaur ancestors of birds, our team of paleontologists and paleobiologists scoured research papers and museum collections looking for fossils that preserved delicate eye and ear structures. And we found some.
Using scans of fossilized dinosaur skulls, in a paper published in the journal Science on May 6, 2021, we describe the most convincing evidence to date for nocturnal dinosaurs. Two fossil species – Haplocheirus sollers and Shuvuuia deserti – likely had extremely good night vision. But our work also shows that S. deserti also had incredibly sensitive hearing similar to modern-day owls. This is the first time these two traits have been found in the same fossil, suggesting that this small, desert-dwelling dinosaur that lived in ancient Mongolia was probably a specialized night-hunter of insects and small mammals.
Looking to theropods
By studying fossilized eye bones, one of us, Lars Schmitz, had previously found that some small predatory dinosaurs may have hunted at night. Most of these potentially nocturnal hunters were theropods, the group of three-toed dinosaurs that includes Tyrannosaurus rex and modern birds. But to date, fossils for only 12 theropod species included the eye structures that can tell paleontologists about night vision.
Our team identified four more species of theropods with clues for their sense of vision – for a total of 16. We then looked for fossils that preserve the structures of the inner ear and found 17 species. Excitingly, for four species, we were able to get measurements for both eyes and ears.
Eye bones built for night vision
Scleral ossicles are thin, rectangular bone plates that form a ring-like structure surrounding the pupils of lizards as well as birds and their ancestors – dinosaurs. Scleral rings define the largest possible size of an animal’s pupil and can tell you how well that animal can see at night. The larger the pupil compared to the size of the eye, the better a dinosaur could see in the dark.
Since the individual bony ossicles of these rings fell apart after these animals died more than 60 million years ago, our team made scans of the fossils and then digitally reconstructed the eyes. Of all the theropods we examined, H. sollers and S. deserti had some of the proportionally largest pupils.
S. deserti‘s pupil made up more than half of its eye, very similar to night-vision specialists that live today like geckos and nightjars. Our team then compared the fossils to 55 living species of lizards and 367 species of birds with known day or night activity patterns. According to the statistical analyses our team performed, there is a very high chance – higher than 90% – that H. sollers and S. deserti were nocturnal.
But those were not the only two theropods our team looked at. Our analysis also found a few other likely nighttime specialists – such as Megapnosaurus kayentakatae – as well as daylight specialists like Almas ukhaa. But we also found some species – like Velociraptor mongoliensis – with eyesight seemingly adapted for medium light levels. This might suggest that they hunted around dawn or dusk.
Incredible ears of a dinosaur
In today’s nocturnal animals, hearing can be as important as keen eyesight. To figure out how well these extinct dinosaurs could hear, we scanned the skulls of 17 fossil theropods to decipher the structure of their inner ears and then compared our scans to the ears of modern animals.
Our scans showed that S. deserti had an extremely elongated inner ear canal for its size – also similar to that of the living barn owl and proportionally much longer than all of the other 88 living bird species we analyzed for comparison. Based on our measurements, among dinosaurs, we found that predators had generally better hearing than herbivores. Several predators – including V. mongoliensis – also had moderately elongated inner ears, but none rivaled S. deserti’s.
The life of a nocturnal dinosaur
By studying the sensory abilities of dinosaurs, paleontologists like us not only are learning what species roamed the night, but can also begin to infer how these dinosaurs lived and shared resources.
S. deserti had extreme night vision and sensitive hearing, and this little dinosaur probably used its incredible senses to hunt prey at night. It could likely hear and follow rustling from a distance before visually detecting its prey and digging it up from the ground with its short single-clawed arms. In the dry, desert-like habitats of millions of years ago, it might have been an evolutionary advantage to be active in the cooler temperatures of the night.
But according to our analysis, S. deserti wasn’t the only dinosaur active at night. Other dinosaurs like V. mongoliensis and the plant-eating Protoceratops mongoliensis both lived in the same habitat and had some level of night vision.
Paleontologists currently do not know the full suite of animals that shared S. deserti’s extreme nocturnal lifestyle in the ancient deserts of Mongolia – it is rare to find fossils with the right bones intact that allow paleontologists to investigate their senses. However, the presence of a specialized night forager highlights that much like today, some dinosaurs avoided the dangers and competition of daylight hours and roamed under the stars.
[Listen to this bonus “City of Refuge” episode or read the following article adapted from the transcript.]
As the world shuts down amid this terrifying pandemic, it’s hard to know what to do — or, just simply, how to be. I’ve tried reading news story after news story and scrolling endlessly through Twitter, but neither have left me feeling any more enlightened.
The only thing that’s proven helpful thus far is a 73-year-old novel that’s been on my reading list for several years now: Albert Camus’ “The Plague.”
Although written during World War II — and intended as an allegory for the Nazi occupation of France — this classic novel feels immediately relevant. A disease that spreads from animals to humans wreaks havoc on an unprepared population, one that is too wrapped up in itself and its economic dealings to take the threat seriously at first. Meanwhile, self-interested politicians delay making important decisions. Eventually, when denial no longer works, there are quarantines, supply shortages, fake remedies, issues with masks and, of course, mounting deaths. If not for the fact that the plague only ravishes a single town — instead of the entire world — it would seem almost perfectly prescient.
Nevertheless, the novel resonates in other ways, such as with its theme of exile and isolation. Camus actually introduces it even before the plague arrives, as a comment on modern life in general. The quarantines only make this sense of isolation more acute — something that no doubt feels familiar and will only sink in further once we are fully bored with streaming movies and video chats.
Ultimately, as the novel unfolds, Camus shows us that it’s possible to break out of this depression — even in a moment of crisis — by depicting a kind of active resistance to the plague that fosters solidarity and compassion, with a focus on saving lives.
While I’m far from the first to find this classic so insightful and relevant in our current moment of crisis, I doubt few have had it near the top of their reading list for as long as me. The reason for that is my recently completed 10-part podcast series “City of Refuge,” which tells the little-known story of a cluster of French villages on a remote plateau that rescued 5,000 refugees during World War II.
All throughout my research, Albert Camus and “The Plague” kept popping up. It was mainly as just a side note, because, as it happens, the famous French-Algerian author wrote much of the novel while living on the plateau in one of those courageous villages. He was, in essence, completely surrounded by people doing everything they could to save the lives of those in need.
I was never quite sure how, or whether, to mention this interesting fact in my series. And now I’m glad I didn’t merely mention it, because it’s deserving of a deeper dive. So, what follows is an examination of Albert Camus’ “The Plague” and the real-life nonviolent history that helped shape its timely, and timeless, message.
Albert Camus left his native Algeria in the summer of 1943 with the plan of spending the winter in the mountains of France. He had contracted tuberculosis in both of his lungs, and his doctor prescribed the fresh air as part of his treatment. Camus’ wife, Francine, knew of the perfect place — a quiet, sparsely populated plateau in south-central France, where she had often vacationed as a child.
Once they were settled into a boarding house — only two miles from the village of Le Chambon, the center of the plateau’s nonviolent resistance — Camus and his wife enjoyed the rest of their summer together. Then, in the fall, Francine returned to her teaching position in Algeria. Camus soon decided to join her, as the war was worsening and getting home seemed like a good idea. But just as he had made plans to hop a steamer back to Algeria, the Allies invaded North Africa.
It was November 7, 1942, and with the Nazis quickly responding to the invasion by occupying Southern France, Camus was now trapped. Days later, in his notebook, he drove the point home further, writing down the phrase “Like rats!”
It isn’t surprising he made this analogy. Rats were on his mind a lot in those days. They were the harbinger of death in the novel he had begun working on a year earlier — a novel that would, of course, become the acclaimed “La Peste” or “The Plague.” At this early stage, however, Camus was far from settled on a title. Not only did most of the work lie ahead of him, but the next 14-15 months he would spend on the plateau — exposed to its unique culture of resistance and rescue — would have a serious impact on the novel. Surprisingly, this fact isn’t widely discussed.
“Many of the biographers assumed that Camus didn’t know anything about what was going on on the plateau,” said Patrick Henry, author of “We Only Know Men,” the first book to truly explore Camus’ time on the plateau. “[They] never did their homework.”
In other words, Camus’ biographers weren’t in contact with the plateau’s local historians and researchers to the degree that Henry was. In fact, it was thanks to one of those contacts that he was able to interview an old friend of Camus’ — a Jewish French Algerian named André Chouraqui, who lived on the plateau during the war.
“Camus used to go to his house, and they would eat Algerian food and talk,” Henry said. “He was a specialist on the Bible, and he talked to Camus about the plague and the significance of the plague in the Hebrew Bible.”
Importantly, Chouraqui did clandestine work for the Jewish relief organization Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants, or OSE. “City of Refuge” listeners will recognize it as the organization Jewish rescuer Madeleine Dreyfus worked with. In fact, after she was arrested, it was Chouraqui who took over her duties of bringing refugee children to the plateau and hiding them. Learning this naturally made Henry wonder how much Camus knew about the rescue operation being conducted on the plateau.
“André Chouraqui wrote and told me, ‘Of course Camus knew everything that was going on,’” Henry explained. In fact, it would have been hard for him to miss — as, according to Henry, “There were actually Jews living in the same boarding house where Camus was living.”
Given how ubiquitous the rescue operation was on the plateau by this point, the next obvious question was whether or not Camus knew André Trocmé, the plateau’s charismatic pastor who lived in Le Chambon and was one of the driving forces behind the rescue effort.
Chouraqui told Henry that “Albert Camus had always known about the resistance that Pastors [Edouard] Theis and Trocmé conducted in Le Chambon,” but wasn’t sure Camus knew André Trocmé personally.
Nelly Hewett, André Trocmé’s daughter, confirmed this when I spoke to her. She said that although her parents never met Camus, “They knew of Chouraqui and he knew of them.” She also mentioned Pierre Fayol, the Jewish leader of the plateau’s armed resistance.
“They all were friends those guys. Fayol visited with my dad. Chouraqui visited with my dad. They had an inner group of which my dad was not a part. But they respected my dad’s work.”
Henry did some more digging and found that Fayol mentioned Camus in his memoir several times, noting that they often listened to the BBC together. This meant that Camus was plugged into all aspects of resistance on the plateau. That said, it’s important to note that resistance armies didn’t start popping up in France until around the time Camus arrived on the plateau, about midway through the war. The nonviolent resistance in Le Chambon and the surrounding area, on the other hand, had been going on for a couple of years already. Nevertheless, Fayol was respectful of its mission.
“On the plateau, there was very little killing going on,” Henry said. “Trocmé and Fayol were working together because they knew that, if they attacked, the Germans would bomb the place or kill people and the whole rescue mission would be destroyed. There wasn’t a great question of violence on the plateau.”
‘A greatness that I don’t have’
Realizing that Camus was apprised of these goings on, Henry began to see “The Plague” in a new light.
“Once I got that, it was like the key to the novel,” he said. “Let me read the novel now with everything I know about Le Chambon, and see what connections I can make.”
For starters, at just the surface level, there was the obvious allegory to the Occupation.
“In France the Germans were considered like a plague,” Henry explained, adding that they were called “la peste brune,” or “the brown plague,” because of their brown uniforms.
Although the idea of the allegory is well-established, it’s not always been appreciated by critics. Jean-Paul Sartre and other French thinkers were upset with Camus for comparing Nazism to a nonhuman phenomenon that was unrelated to human evil and therefore out of our control. But Camus’ plague was a stand-in for more than fascism. It was also a symbol for what he considered to be, more broadly, our culture of death — which he saw on all sides of the political spectrum, from the wealthy conservative establishment to the revolutionary dictatorships of the left. As a result, existential Marxists like Sartre were already primed to take issue with Camus and his novel. According to Henry, Sartre’s magazine Les Temps Modernes called it “boy scout morality” — really denigrating it in the worst way.
While the Marxists saw Camus as a pacifist, his actual views were a bit more complicated. We’ll explore that more momentarily. But first, let’s continue to examine the other connections between “The Plague” and the plateau — namely how some of the characters in the book resemble real people Camus knew or heard about.
One such character is Joseph Grand, a sort of secondary character who the narrator at one point refers to as the hero. But that comes with a bit of a qualification. Since Camus didn’t find the concept of heroism appealing, he has his narrator say that if there were a hero, it would be Grand because he’s just an ordinary man who did the right thing without thinking about it or seeking recognition.
“That’s the guy who is living right next to Camus,” Henry noted, referring to a scene in the 1989 documentary “Weapons of the Spirit,” where Director Pierre Sauvage interviews Camus’ real-life neighbor on the plateau, a man named Émile Grand. Whether the character in the novel is meant to be him it’s hard to say. More broadly, the Grand character seems to be a strong representation of the plateau’s rescuers at large. As André Trocmé’s wife, Magda, once said, “None of us thought that we were heroes. We were just people trying to do our best.”
In “The Plague” resistance is depicted through what are called “sanitary squads,” a sort of civilian-based defense against the death-dealing pathogen. Notably, they are created and organized by a rather idiosyncratic pacifist character named Jean Tarrou, who shares a few commonalities with Camus himself — aside from his rhyming last name.
“Camus was against killing,” Henry explained. “He waged war against the death penalty in France. His father saw an execution and came home and vomited. Camus heard the story about his father, and he tells the it in ‘The Plague.’”
More specifically, the character of Tarrou tells it. Only, instead of Tarrou’s father witnessing the execution, his father is actually the prosecutor demanding the death penalty. Tarrou explains that he saw his father’s state-sanctioned blood lust and decided to run away. At first, he joins various leftist struggles against oppression. Eventually, though, he comes to the realization that because these struggles sometimes involved killing to achieve their means he was fighting against an unjust system without bringing a just one into existence. Because of this, Tarrou says, “I had the plague already, long before I came to this town.” In short, he’s noting Camus’ broader use of the plague as a metaphor for humanity’s self-destructive qualities.
As Camus saw it, there is only one thing you can do with this knowledge: Become what he called “a rebel,” or someone who stands up for life and solidarity. In the novel, Tarrou explains his philosophy by saying, “There are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.”
For this reason, Henry describes Tarrou as “the ideal total nonviolent person.”
At one point in the novel, Tarrou lays out his basic formulation on pacifism, saying, “I decided to reject everything which directly or indirectly, for good reasons or for bad, kills. I definitely refuse to kill.”
It’s such a perfectly stated position on pacifism, and yet Camus himself was not an absolute pacifist. For all the nonviolence imagery in the novel, Camus saw violence as both “unavoidable and unjustifiable.” In fact, while writing to a friend nearly a decade after the war, he said: “I studied the theory of nonviolence, and I’m not far from concluding that it represents a truth worthy of being taught by example, but to do so one would need a greatness that I don’t have.”
However, Camus does let his character Tarrou have it.
“Tarrou has the greatness, and it links to Trocmé, who believes that one must resist violence but only with ‘the weapons of the spirit,’” Henry said.
At the same time, however, Tarrou has key differences with André Trocmé — namely religion. Tarrou says he wants to become a saint without God. But André Trocmé, a Protestant minister, was absolutely a man of God. Interestingly, though, his wife Magda was not religious and therefore, in many ways, embodied this idea of a secular saint.
“Mother always said that she really didn’t believe in God — the God that was usually a ‘He’ and was the head of the world and solving the problems,” Hewitt said. “But she had everything else that made her a Christian. All the qualities, all the generosity.”
So, if Tarrou was a match for anyone on the plateau at that time, it was almost certainly Magda Trocmé. That said, as I mentioned earlier, the Tarrou character is closer to Camus himself than any other real person.
According to the acclaimed theologian and writer Thomas Merton, Camus had a hard time accepting nonviolence because of how much he associated it with Christianity, which he largely rejected and saw as pushing a kind of self-interested do-nothing nonviolence. This is unfortunate, Merton argues, because it led Camus to overlook authentic nonviolence, which in many ways mirrors the kind of active resistance he clearly admired.
Ultimately, in Merton’s assessment, Camus didn’t like to offer precise doctrines or absolute formulas. He was quite reasonably — like any activist today — not wanting to preach or prescribe from a position of privilege. So, according to Merton, “at the risk of seeming inconclusive,” Camus “does not prescribe a method or tactic.”
Nevertheless, it’s not hard to read between the lines of “The Plague” and see what kind of resistance Camus is getting at.
“Camus is recognizing the nonviolent struggle for saving human lives,” Henry said. “Stopping people from getting infected, etc.”
In fact, the one instance of “revolutionary violence” that appears in the novel fails to achieve anything. It happens when a few armed men attack the gates of the town, trying to break out. They exchange fire with security forces, leading to a few deaths. This only really succeeds in sparking a wave of looting, that in turn led to martial law and executions. But, as Camus notes, there were so many deaths from the plague at this point, nobody cared — they were “a mere drop in the ocean.”
This isn’t to say Camus isn’t sympathetic to the stress and anxiety that led to the violence and lawlessness. We relate to one of his characters, a journalist named Raymond Rambert, who — like Camus — is an outsider, trapped in this place and separated from his wife. Rambert tries to escape by securing clearance papers through an illicit underground network. But along the way he has a change of heart and decides to stay, joining the sanitary squads and aiding the struggle to defeat the plague.
“That’s what happened to Camus,” Henry explained. “He tried to get out, and then he didn’t go out. And just like the character in the novel, he believes that he belongs there. And it is his duty to be part of the Resistance.”
In the fall of 1943, after more than a year on the plateau — witnessing active resistance to the Nazi agenda — Camus moved to Paris, where he became co-editor of Combat, the underground resistance newspaper. Even then, however, rescue work remained on his mind. He even tried to help hide a Jewish woman he met by writing a letter to Pierre Fayol back on the plateau saying “I’m sending someone to you who has a hereditary infection.”
“Camus knew what was happening,” Henry said. “He was sending a Jew to be protected there in Le Chambon.”
‘Fashion an art of living in times of catastrophe’
There’s one last character in “The Plague” worth exploring, and he’s probably the most important, as he’s also the novel’s narrator. His name is Bernard Rieux, and he is the town’s doctor. (Incidentally, there was a similarly named real-life Dr. Riou in Le Chambon during that time.) He is in many ways a different side of the same coin as Tarrou.
When Tarrou says he wants to become “a saint without God,” Rieux says he just wants “to be a man.” Tarrou then responds by saying, “Yes, we’re both after the same thing, but I’m less ambitious.” It’s a rather telling bit of self-deprecating humor through which Camus is letting us know that Tarrou’s pursuit of secular sainthood and Rieux’s pursuit of being a decent person are basically the same thing.
However, if there is a difference in the labels, it could be argued that by the end of the novel, it is Tarrou who becomes a man and Dr. Rieux who becomes a “saint without God.” Whereas Tarrou gets out of his head a bit and starts living not as an outsider, but in solidarity with his fellow citizens, Dr. Rieux is tested and never comes up short. He just continues to cure the sick and relieve human suffering. Notably, he is a healer, a term that Tarrou seems to equate with the saints. Most importantly, though, both characters have no desire to prove anything — and this is the quality that ties them back to the people of the plateau.
“Weapons of the Spirit” Director Pierre Sauvage underscored this connection in his film, noting this passage from the novel: “For those of our townspeople who were then risking their lives, the decision they had to make was simply whether or not they were in the midst of a plague and whether or not it was necessary to struggle against it. The essential thing was to save the largest number of people from dying. The only way to do this was to fight the plague. There was nothing admirable about this attitude. It was merely logical.”
Ultimately, it’s the message of “The Plague” — not the characters or the type of resistance depicted — that’s in sync with what happened on the plateau during the war. When accepting the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, a decade after “The Plague” came out, Camus essentially summed up that message, saying, he wanted people to “fashion an art of living in times of catastrophe, to be reborn by fighting openly against the death instinct at work in our society.”
Camus himself, however, did not live much longer. It was only a few years later, in 1960, that he died in a car crash at the age of 47. Despite having accomplished so much at a relatively young age, there are those who think even bigger things were in the works.
“Camus was going somewhere,” Henry said. “Some say Camus was on the road to a religious conversion, but it could have been a conversion to something where he would be able to accept total nonviolence.”
This is not hard to imagine. After all, as Merton noted, Camus oftentimes spoke like a pacifist and, in practice, came very close to the nonviolent position. Much like ardent pacifist André Trocmé, Camus spoke out against revenge killings after the Germans had been defeated. He also was one of the first to condemn the bombing of Hiroshima, calling it “the ultimate phase of barbarism” in human history.
Whether or not he was headed toward some kind of personal conversion to total nonviolence isn’t really the point. It merely underscores that Camus was one of the few leading international voices of his time willing to consider its merits. In fact, he reportedly attended a conference on peace and peacemaking in Le Chambon shortly after the war. It was organized by none other than André Trocmé and attended by pacifist leaders from around the world.
According to Henry, “He was sitting in the back of the room and made some remark about people getting together to talk about these things is wonderful.”
Ultimately, what drew Camus to nonviolence — at least the kind practiced on the plateau during the war — is the focus on saving, not harming, lives.
“On the plateau he recognizes that nonviolence is a great way of saving Jews,” Henry said. “The Jews that were saved during the Holocaust were not saved by confronting the Nazis with violence. They always got killed when they did that. They couldn’t defeat this machine.”
In short, Camus saw something special happening on this tiny, isolated plateau where he was stuck for part of the war, and he drew inspiration from it to produce a singular work of art that offers empowering lessons on how to act in moments of crisis. Viewed from our current position, in the middle of this pandemic, it’s quite simple.
“When you leave it at the level of the microbe, it’s not complicated today,” Henry said. “We don’t have to kill anybody. We have to remain decent.”
Even then, however, the plague is never fully defeated. As Camus’ character Dr. Rieux notes on the final page of the novel, after the city overcomes the outbreak, “The plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good.” It lies dormant, until the day it rouses up its rats again and sends them forth to die in some unsuspecting place.
For that reason, we must never forget how to fight it — whether it comes in the form of a pathogen, fascism or some other cynical, destructive force. As the stories of the plateau and “The Plague” tell us, we are going to need solidarity, compassion and a steadfast commitment to saving lives.
In the words of Camus, “What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.”
The rumble of President John Adams’s coach had hardly died away in the distance on the morning of March 4,1801, when Mr. Thomas Jefferson entered the breakfast room of Conrad’s boarding house on Capitol Hill, where he had been living in bachelor’s quarters during his Vice-Presidency. He took his usual seat at the lower end of the table among the other boarders, declining with a smile to accept the chair of the impulsive Mrs. Brown, who felt, in spite of her democratic principles, that on this day of all days Mr. Jefferson should have the place which he had obstinately refused to occupy at the head of the table and near the fireplace. There were others besides the wife of the Senator from Kentucky who felt that Mr. Jefferson was carrying equality too far. But Mr. Jefferson would not take precedence over the Congressmen who were his fellow boarders.
Conrad’s was conveniently near the Capitol, on the south side of the hill, and commanded an extensive view. The slope of the hill, which was a wild tangle of verdure in summer, debouched into a wide plain extending to the Potomac. Through this lowland wandered a little stream, once known as Goose Creek but now dignified by the name of Tiber. The banks of the stream as well as of the Potomac were fringed with native flowering shrubs and graceful trees, in which Mr. Jefferson took great delight. The prospect from his drawing-room windows, indeed, quite as much as anything else, attached him to Conrad’s.
As was his wont, Mr. Jefferson withdrew to his study after breakfast and doubtless ran over the pages of a manuscript which he had been preparing with some care for this Fourth of March. It may be guessed, too, that here, as at Monticello, he made his usual observations-noting in his diary the temperature, jotting down in the garden-book which he kept for thirty years an item or two about the planting of vegetables, and recording, as he continued to do for eight years, the earliest and latest appearance of each comestible in the Washington market. Perhaps he made a few notes about the “seeds of the cymbling (cucurbita vermeosa) and squash (cucurbita melopipo)” which he purposed to send to his friend Philip Mazzei, with directions for planting; or even wrote a letter full of reflections upon bigotry in politics and religion to Dr. Joseph Priestley, whom he hoped soon to have as his guest in the President’s House.
Toward noon Mr. Jefferson stepped out of the house and walked over to the Capitol—a tall, rather loose-jointed figure, with swinging stride, symbolizing, one is tempted to think, the angularity of the American character. “A tall, large-boned farmer,” an unfriendly English observer called him. His complexion was that of a man constantly exposed to the sun—sandy or freckled, contemporaries called it—but his features were clean-cut and strong and his expression was always kindly and benignant.
Aside from salvos of artillery at the hour of twelve, the inauguration of Mr. Jefferson as President of the United States was marked by extreme simplicity. In the Senate chamber of the unfinished Capitol, he was met by Aaron Burr, who had already been installed as presiding officer, and conducted to the Vice-President’s chair, while that debonair man of the world took a seat on his right with easy grace. On Mr. Jefferson’s left sat Chief Justice John Marshall, a “tall, lax, lounging Virginian,” with black eyes peering out from his swarthy countenance. There is a dramatic quality in this scene of the President-to-be seated between two men who are to cause him more vexation of spirit than any others in public life. Burr, brilliant, gifted, ambitious, and profligate; Marshall, temperamentally and by conviction opposed to the principles which seemed to have triumphed in the election of this radical Virginian, to whom indeed he had a deep-seated aversion. After a short pause, Mr. Jefferson rose and read his Inaugural Address in a tone so low that it could be heard by only a few in the crowded chamber.
Those who expected to hear revolutionary doctrines must have been surprised by the studied moderation of this address. There was not a Federalist within hearing of Jefferson’s voice who could not have subscribed to all the articles in this profession of political faith. “Equal and exact justice to all men”—”a jealous care of the right of election by the people”—”absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority”—”the supremacy of the civil over the military authority”—”the honest payments of our debts”—”freedom of religion”—”freedom of the press”—”freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus”—what were these principles but the bright constellation, as Jefferson said, “which has guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation?” John Adams himself might have enunciated all these principles, though he would have distributed the emphasis somewhat differently.
But what did Jefferson mean when he said, “We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans—we are all Federalists.” If this was true, what, pray, became of the revolution of 1800, which Jefferson had declared “as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form?” Even Jefferson’s own followers shook their heads dubiously over this passage as they read and reread it in the news-sheets. It sounded a false note while the echoes of the campaign of 1800 were still reverberating. If Hamilton and his followers were monarchists at heart in 1800, bent upon overthrowing the Government, how could they and the triumphant Republicans be brethren of the same principle in 1801? The truth of the matter is that Jefferson was holding out an olive branch to his political opponents. He believed, as he remarked in a private letter, that many Federalists were sound Republicans at heart who had been stampeded into the ranks of his opponents during the recent troubles with France. These lost political sheep Jefferson was bent upon restoring to the Republican fold by avoiding utterances and acts which would offend them. “I always exclude the leaders from these considerations,” he added confidentially. In short, this Inaugural Address was less a great state paper, marking a broad path for the Government to follow under stalwart leadership, than an astute effort to consolidate the victory of the Republican party.
Disappointing the address must have been to those who had expected a declaration of specific policy. Yet the historian, wiser by the march of events, may read between the lines. When Jefferson said that he desired a wise and frugal government—a government “which should restrain men from injuring one another but otherwise leave them free to regulate their own pursuits—” and when he announced his purpose “to support the state governments in all their rights” and to cultivate “peace with all nations—entangling alliances with none,” he was in effect formulating a policy. But all this was in the womb of the future.
It was many weeks before Jefferson took up his abode in the President’s House. In the interval he remained in his old quarters, except for a visit to Monticello to arrange for his removal, which indeed he was in no haste to make, for “The Palace,” as the President’s House was dubbed satirically, was not yet finished; its walls were not fully plastered, and it still lacked the main staircase-which, it must be admitted, was a serious defect if the new President meant to hold court. Besides, it was inconveniently situated at the other end of the, straggling, unkempt village. At Conrad’s Jefferson could still keep in touch with those members of Congress and those friends upon whose advice he relied in putting “our Argosie on her Republican tack,” as he was wont to say. Here, in his drawing-room, he could talk freely with practical politicians such as Charles Pinckney, who had carried the ticket to success in South Carolina and who might reasonably expect to be consulted in organizing the new Administration.
The chief posts in the President’s official household, save one, were readily filled. There were only five heads of departments to be appointed, and of these the Attorney-General might be described as a head without a department, since the duties of his office were few and required only his occasional attention. As it fell out, however, the Attorney-General whom Jefferson appointed, Levi Lincoln of Massachusetts, practically carried on the work of all the Executive Departments until his colleagues were duly appointed and commissioned. For Secretary of War Jefferson chose another reliable New Englander, Henry Dearborn of Maine. The naval portfolio went begging, perhaps because the navy was not an imposing branch of the service, or because the new President had announced his desire to lay up all seven frigates in the eastern branch of the Potomac, where “they would be under the immediate eye of the department and would require but one set of plunderers to look after them.” One conspicuous Republican after another declined this dubious honor, and in the end Jefferson was obliged to appoint as Secretary of the Navy Robert Smith, whose chief qualification was his kinship to General Samuel Smith, an influential politician of Maryland.
The appointment by Jefferson of James Madison as Secretary of State occasioned no surprise, for the intimate friendship of the two Virginians and their long and close association in politics led everyone to expect that he would occupy an important post in the new Administration, though in truth that friendship was based on something deeper and finer than mere agreement in politics. “I do believe,” exclaimed a lady who often saw both men in private life, “father never loved son more than Mr. Jefferson loves Mr. Madison.” The difference in age, however, was not great, for Jefferson was in his fifty-eighth year and Madison in his fiftieth. It was rather mien and character that suggested the filial relationship. Jefferson was, or could be if he chose, an imposing figure; his stature was six feet two and one-half inches. Madison had the ways and habits of a little man, for he was only five feet six. Madison was naturally timid and retiring in the presence of other men, but he was at his best in the company of his friend Jefferson, who valued his attainments. Indeed, the two men supplemented each other. If Jefferson was prone to theorize, Madison was disposed to find historical evidence to support a political doctrine. While Jefferson generalized boldly, even rashly, Madison hesitated, temporized, weighed the pros and cons, and came with difficulty to a conclusion. Unhappily neither was a good judge of men. When pitted against a Bonaparte, a Talleyrand, or a Canning, they appeared provincial in their ways and limited in their sympathetic understanding of statesmen of the Old World.
Next to that of Madison, Jefferson valued the friendship of Albert Gallatin, whom he made Secretary of the Treasury by a recess appointment, since there was some reason to fear that the Federalist Senate would not confirm the nomination. The Federalists could never forget that Gallatin was a Swiss by birth—an alien of supposedly radical tendencies. The partisan press never exhibited its crass provincialism more shamefully than when it made fun of Gallatin’s imperfect pronunciation of English. He had come to America, indeed, too late to acquire a perfect control of a new tongue, but not too late to become a loyal son of his adopted country. He brought to Jefferson’s group of advisers not only a thorough knowledge of public finance but a sound judgment and a statesmanlike vision, which were often needed to rectify the political vagaries of his chief.
The last of his Cabinet appointments made, Jefferson returned to his country seat at Monticello for August and September, for he was determined not to pass those two “bilious months” in Washington. “I have not done it these forty years,” he wrote to Gallatin. “Grumble who will, I will never pass those two months on tidewater.” To Monticello, indeed, Jefferson turned whenever his duties permitted and not merely in the sickly months of summer, for when the roads were good the journey was rapidly and easily made by stage or chaise. There, in his garden and farm, he found relief from the distractions of public life. “No occupation is so delightful to me,” he confessed, “as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.” At Monticello, too, he could gratify his delight in the natural sciences, for he was a true child of the eighteenth century in his insatiable curiosity about the physical universe and in his desire to reduce that universe to an intelligible mechanism. He was by instinct a rationalist and a foe to superstition in any form, whether in science or religion. His indefatigable pen was as ready to discuss vaccination and yellow fever with Dr. Benjamin Rush as it was to exchange views with Dr. Priestley on the ethics of Jesus.
The diversity of Jefferson’s interests is truly remarkable. Monticello is a monument to his almost Yankee-like ingenuity. He writes to his friend Thomas Paine to assure him that the semi-cylindrical form of roof after the De Lorme pattern, which he proposes for his house, is entirely practicable, for he himself had “used it at home for a dome, being 120 degrees of an oblong octagon.” He was characteristically American in his receptivity to new ideas from any source. A chance item about Eli Whitney of New Haven arrests his attention and forthwith he writes to Madison recommending a “Mr. Whitney at Connecticut, a mechanic of the first order of ingenuity, who invented the cotton gin,” and who has recently invented “molds and machines for making all the pieces of his [musket] locks so exactly equal that take one hundred locks to pieces and mingle their parts and the hundred locks may be put together as well by taking the first pieces which come to hand.” To Robert Fulton, then laboring to perfect his torpedoes and submarine, Jefferson wrote encouragingly: “I have ever looked to the submarine boat as most to be depended on for attaching them [i. e., torpedoes]…. I am in hopes it is not to be abandoned as impracticable.”
It was not wholly affectation, therefore, when Jefferson wrote, “Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived, have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions.” One can readily picture this Virginia farmer-philosopher ruefully closing his study door, taking a last look over the gardens and fields of Monticello, in the golden days of October, and mounting Wildair, his handsome thoroughbred, setting out on the dusty road for that little political world at Washington, where rumor so often got the better of reason and where gossip was so likely to destroy philosophic serenity.
Jefferson had been a widower for many years; and so, since his daughters were married and had households of their own, he was forced to preside over his menage at Washington without the feminine touch and tact so much needed at this American court. Perhaps it was this unhappy circumstance quite as much as his dislike for ceremonies and formalities that made Jefferson do away with the weekly levees of his predecessors and appoint only two days, the First of January and the Fourth of July, for public receptions. On such occasions he begged Mrs. Dolly Madison to act as hostess; and a charming and gracious figure she was, casting a certain extenuating veil over the President’s gaucheries. Jefferson held, with his many political heresies, certain theories of social intercourse which ran rudely counter to the prevailing etiquette of foreign courts. Among the rules which he devised for his republican court, the precedence due to rank was conspicuously absent, because he held that “all persons when brought together in society are perfectly equal, whether foreign or domestic, titled or untitled, in or out of office.” One of these rules to which the Cabinet gravely subscribed read as follows:
“To maintain the principles of equality, or of pele mele, and prevent the growth of precedence out of courtesy, the members of the Executive will practise at their own houses, and recommend an adherence to the ancient usage of the country, of gentlemen in mass giving precedence to the ladies in mass, in passing from one apartment where they are assembled into another.”
The application of this rule on one occasion gave rise to an incident which convulsed Washington society. President Jefferson had invited to dinner the new British Minister Merry and his wife, the Spanish Minister Yrujo and his wife, the French Minister Pichon and his wife, and Mr. and Mrs. Madison. When dinner was announced, Mr. Jefferson gave his hand to Mrs. Madison and seated her on his right, leaving the rest to straggle in as they pleased. Merry, fresh from the Court of St. James, was aghast and affronted; and when a few days later, at a dinner given by the Secretary of State, he saw Mrs. Merry left without an escort, while Mr. Madison took Mrs. Gallatin to the table, he believed that a deliberate insult was intended. To appease this indignant Briton the President was obliged to explain officially his rule of “pole mele”; but Mrs. Merry was not appeased and positively refused to appear at the President’s New Year’s Day reception. “Since then,” wrote the amused Pichon, “Washington society is turned upside down; all the women are to the last degree exasperated against Mrs. Merry; the Federalist newspapers have taken up the matter, and increased the irritations by sarcasms on the administration and by making a burlesque of the facts.” Then Merry refused an invitation to dine again at the President’s, saying that he awaited instructions from his Government; and the Marquis Yrujo, who had reasons of his own for fomenting trouble, struck an alliance with the Merrys and also declined the President’s invitation. Jefferson was incensed at their conduct, but put the blame upon Mrs. Merry, whom he characterized privately as a “virago who has already disturbed our harmony extremely.”
A brilliant English essayist has observed that a government to secure obedience must first excite reverence. Some such perception, coinciding with native taste, had moved George Washington to assume the trappings of royalty, in order to surround the new presidential office with impressive dignity. Posterity has, accordingly, visualized the first President and Father of his Country as a statuesque figure, posing at formal levees with a long sword in a scabbard of white polished leather, and clothed in black velvet knee-breeches, with yellow gloves and a cocked hat. The third President of the United States harbored no such illusions and affected no such poses. Governments were made by rational beings—”by the consent of the governed,” he had written in a memorable document—and rested on no emotional basis. Thomas Jefferson remained Thomas Jefferson after his election to the chief magistracy; and so contemporaries saw him in the President’s House, an unimpressive figure clad in “a blue coat, a thick gray-colored hairy waistcoat, with a red underwaist lapped over it, green velveteen breeches, with pearl buttons, yarn stockings, and slippers down at the heels.” Anyone might have found him, as Senator Maclay did, sitting “in a lounging manner, on one hip commonly, and with one of his shoulders elevated much above the other,” a loose, shackling figure with no pretense at dignity.
In his dislike for all artificial distinctions between man and man, Jefferson determined from the outset to dispense a true Southern hospitality at the President’s House and to welcome any one at any hour on any day. There was therefore some point to John Quincy Adams’s witticism that Jefferson’s “whole eight years was a levee.” No one could deny that he entertained handsomely. Even his political opponents rose from his table with a comfortable feeling of satiety which made them more kindly in their attitude toward their host. “We sat down at the table at four,” wrote Senator Plumer of New Hampshire, “rose at six, and walked immediately into another room and drank coffee. We had a very good dinner, with a profusion of fruits and sweetmeats. The wine was the best I ever drank, particularly the champagne, which was indeed delicious.”
It was in the circle of his intimates that Jefferson appeared at his best, and of all his intimate friends Madison knew best how to evoke the true Jefferson. To outsiders Madison appeared rather taciturn, but among his friends he was genial and even lively, amusing all by his ready humor and flashes of wit. To his changes of mood Jefferson always responded. Once started Jefferson would talk on and on, in a loose and rambling fashion, with a great deal of exaggeration and with many vagaries, yet always scattering much information on a great variety of topics. Here we may leave him for the moment, in the exhilarating hours following his inauguration, discoursing with Pinckney, Gallatin, Madison, Burr, Randolph, Giles, Macon, and many another good Republican, and evolving the policies of his Administration.
^^^
Allen Johnson was a historian and author of Jefferson and his Colleagues, from which this article is excerpted. Image from John Trumbull, painted in 1788.
What do witches have to do with your favorite beer?
When I pose this question to students in my American literature and culture classes, I receive stunned silence or nervous laughs. The Sanderson sisters didn’t chug down bottles of Sam Adams in “Hocus Pocus.” But the history of beer points to a not-so-magical legacy of transatlantic slander and gender roles.
Up until the 1500s, brewing was primarily women’s work – that is, until a smear campaign accused women brewers of being witches. Much of the iconography we associate with witches today, from the pointy hat to the broom, may have emerged from their connection to female brewers.
A routine household task
Humans have been drinking beer for almost 7,000 years, and the original brewers were women. From the Vikings to the Egyptians, women brewed beer both for religious ceremonies and to make a practical, calorie-rich beverage for the home.
In fact, the nun Hildegard von Bingen, who lived in modern-day Germany, famously wrote about hops in the 12th century and added the ingredient to her beer recipe.
From the Stone Age to the 1700s, ale – and, later, beer – was a household staple for most families in England and other parts of Europe. The drink was an inexpensive way to consume and preserve grains. For the working class, beer provided an important source of nutrients, full of carbohydrates and proteins. Because the beverage was such a common part of the average person’s diet, fermenting was, for many women, one of their normal household tasks.
Some enterprising women took this household skill to the marketplace and began selling beer. Widows or unmarried women used their fermentation prowess to earn some extra money, while married women partnered with their husbands to run their beer business.
Exiling women from the industry
So if you traveled back in time to the Middle Ages or the Renaissance and went to a market in England, you’d probably see an oddly familiar sight: women wearing tall, pointy hats. In many instances, they’d be standing in front of big cauldrons.
They wore the tall, pointy hats so that their customers could see them in the crowded marketplace. They transported their brew in cauldrons. And those who sold their beer out of stores had cats not as demon familiars, but to keep mice away from the grain. Some argue that iconography we associate with witches, from the pointy hat to the cauldron, originated from women working as master brewers.
Just as women were establishing their foothold in the beer markets of England, Ireland and the rest of Europe, the Reformation began. The religious movement, which originated in the early 16th century, preached stricter gender norms and condemned witchcraft.
Male brewers saw an opportunity. To reduce their competition in the beer trade, some accused female brewers of being witches and using their cauldrons to brew up magic potions instead of booze.
Unfortunately, the rumors took hold.
Over time, it became more dangerous for women to practice brewing and sell beer because they could be misidentified as witches. At the time, being accused of witchcraft wasn’t just a social faux pas; it could result in prosecution or a death sentence. Women accused of witchcraft were often ostracized in their communities, imprisoned or even killed.
Some men didn’t really believe that the women brewers were witches. However, many did believe that women shouldn’t be spending their time making beer. The process took time and dedication: hours to prepare the ale, sweep the floors clean and lift heavy bundles of rye and grain. If women couldn’t brew ale, they would have significantly more time at home to raise their children. In the 1500s some towns, such as Chester, England, actually made it illegal for most women to sell beer, worried that young alewives would grow up into old spinsters.
This gender bias seems to persist in smaller craft breweries as well. A study at Stanford University found that while 17% of craft beer breweries have one female CEO, only 4% of these businesses employ a female brewmaster – the expert supervisor who oversees the brewing process.
It doesn’t have to be this way. For much of history, it wasn’t.
^^^
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to acknowledge that it isn’t definitively known whether alewives inspired some of the popular iconography associated with witches today. It has also been updated to correct that it was during the Reformation that accusations of witchcraft became widespread.
Historically, chanteys – which are also spelled as “shanties” or “chanties” – began with a sing-out by a crew member recognized as “the chanteyman,” usually someone prized for his voice and ability to extemporize. Fellow sailors would respond with the refrain as they toiled away at their tasks. Now we’re seeing TikTok and Twitter users belting out songs inspired by chanteys to their followers, often accompanied by the hashtag #seashanty.
As a chantey scholar, I’m fascinated by the sudden surge of interest in this genre, which dates back to the 15th century and peaked in popularity at the end of the 19th century, right before wooden ships gave way to steam vessels.
The chantey was, historically, a release valve for loneliness, fear and oppression. Finding ourselves in the midst of a pandemic – with the scourge of inequality growing more pervasive by the day – perhaps it’s no coincidence that the chantey has made a triumphant return.
Singing to fears
Sailors were often at sea for several months – sometimes years – at a time.
The work on the ship could be tedious and monotonous. But sporadic dangers were always lurking, from storms to shipboard accidents, fomenting an undercurrent of anxiety, which crews tended to confront with a morbid sense of humor.
Richard Henry Dana Jr., the author of a popular 1840 memoir detailing the two years he spent on a ship, wrote that “you must make a joke of everything at sea; and if you were to fall from aloft and be caught in the belly of a sail, and thus saved from instant death, it would not do to look at all disturbed, or to make a serious matter of it.”
This outlook inspired many chanteys: They entertained the sailors during the monotonous work of the vessel, but their upbeat and cavalier lyrics could nonetheless acknowledge the speed with which clear skies could turn to stormy clouds.
Take George Gordon’s example of the chantey “Blow the Man Down.” In it, the sailor watches, in horror, as a beautiful woman morphs from “a pretty young damsel” to one wholly changed, as she removes her ear, leg, teeth and one eye. Like life at sea, excitement and pleasure quickly transform into terror.
Importantly, there was also a utility to the songs. Cooperation on the ships was, in the words of historian Marcus Rediker, “a collectivism of necessity.”
Merchant ships hired men from varying backgrounds. The songs were a shared language that strengthened the crew’s ties, while also establishing a rhythm to repetitive tasks like hauling, which could entail hoisting sails, and heaving, which might mean walking the capstan. In fact, authentic chanteys are divided into “hauling chanteys” and “heaving chanteys,” though other descriptors exist.
Slyly speaking truth to power
In their songs, sailors told stories of women, ships, ports, food, captains and mates; they spoke to manhood, desire and longing.
Chanteys were also used to push back against the tyranny inherent to life aboard the ship, in which a small number of people – usually the captain and his mate – lorded over the rest. The tension of this dynamic could sometimes boil over into violence.
Some of the songs deployed what anthropologist James C. Scott termed “hidden transcripts” – subtle digs at those in control, who remain oblivious to what’s being said about them.
Accomplished chanteymen could take aim at captains or grouse about food or pay. For example, one rendition of “Blow, Boys, Blow” closes with the pointed line “There will be Sally, Molly, Peg and Nell / And the skipper and mate can go – —- as well.”
In a different version of “Blow, My Bully Boys, Blow,” the character bewails poor food quality aboard the ship: “What d’ye think they have for dinner? / Monkey tails and bullock’s liver.” And in Richard Warner’s 1928 version of “Handy, My Boys,” the singer growls about poor wages: “I thought I heard our old man say / Handy, me boys, so handy! / You can work all day, but you’ll get no pay.”
Similar to other forms of folk music, these chanteys hit thematic notes of dispossession, invisibility and a longing to be seen and heard.
The spirit of the chantey lives on
Many of the songs circulating on social media are not technically chanteys. To be a true chantey, the song must be authenticated as a work song of the sea, sung on ship and created by seamen for shipboard tasks. There was, in fact, a taboo against singing chanteys on land.
Nonetheless, these songs echo the spirit of the chantey.
Though not adrift at sea, many of us find ourselves in territory that is alien and unsettling, with daily life changing in ways that the merchant sailor would understand all too well – a world that was, as the historian Rediker put it, “chronically uncertain.”
Perhaps we will we be able to look back on this bleak period and recognize some glimmers of levity and unity, as when people from disparate worlds connected on social media and noticed they had “a ship stout and strong, and a jolly good crew,” and so decided to sing their way to “one and all.”
^^^
[The Conversation’s science, health and technology editors pick their favorite stories.Weekly on Wednesdays.]
A leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, the inspiration behind Lorraine Hansberry’s play “A Raisin in the Sun” and an uncompromising voice for social justice, Langston Hughes is heralded as one of America’s greatest poets.
It wasn’t always this way. During his career, Hughes was routinely harassed by his own government. And the nation’s literati, balking at his subversive politics, tended to overlook his work.
But the opposite was true abroad, in places like France, Nigeria and Cuba, where Hughes had legions of devoted readers who were some of the first to recognize the promise and power of the poet’s words. In my new book, “Langston Hughes: Critical Lives,” I trace Hughes’ budding international stardom, and how it clashed with the hostility he faced back home.
Building a fan base
Growing up in America, Hughes had experienced racism firsthand. As he matured as poet and writer, he started looking beyond America’s borders, curious to learn more about how racism impacted different cultures.
Between 1924 and his death in 1967, Hughes made trips to places as varied as Italy, Russia, England, Nigeria and Ghana.
During a visit to Cuba in 1930, Hughes met a young Cuban poet named Nicolás Guillén. Hughes had already successfully written dozens of poems inspired by the 12-bar structures, cadences, rhymes and subject matter of blues music. Over the course of several late-night dinners at Lolita’s restaurant in Havana, Hughes encouraged Guillén to do the same with his home country’s music.
Within days of Hughes’ departure, Guillén started writing poems making use of Cuba’s “son tradition,” a form of popular dance music. This was a key moment in the development of an artist who would go on to become Cuba’s national poet.
Hughes was also the only figure of the Harlem Renaissance who traveled to Africa. After several trips to the continent, he became determined to promote the work of his African peers – writers like Bloke Modisane and eventual Nobel Prize-winner Wole Soyinka. So in 1960, he edited his anthology “African Treasury,” which introduced many in the West to some of Africa’s greatest writers.
In countries like Nigeria, Hughes needed no introduction. In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, dozens of Hughes’ poems had appeared in the country’s newspapers and journals. After Nigeria elected Nnamdi Azikiwe, its first native governor-general, in 1960, Azikiwe concluded his inaugural by reciting Hughes’ poem “Youth.”
When Hughes returned to Ghana and Senegal later in the decade, he was greeted like a superstar. Scores of his admirers trailed him in the streets of Dakar, much in the way sports heroes are hounded by children for autographs.
By the 1960s, Hughes’ works were being translated into Russian, Italian, Swedish and Spanish. But the first scholarly study of his poetry appeared in France. Literary critic Jean Wagner’s 1963 book “Black Poets of the United States” highlighted the talents of Hughes as both a poet and activist. Devoting over 100 pages to Hughes, Wagner noted that African Americans would never “produce a more fiery bard” who was simultaneously “one of the community refusing to stand apart as an individual.”
As the first black writer in the United States to make his living solely by writing, Hughes ultimately galvanized scores of emerging writers and poets in Europe, Africa and South America. To them, Hughes represented a critical Western link to other people of color around the world. He was also an exemplar of the jazz and blues music they so revered. As a testament to Hughes’ popularity abroad, it was Venezuela – not the United States – that sought to nominate him for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1960.
Making enemies at home
Back in America, Hughes certainly had his admirers, especially among the African American community. But most establishment figures – in politics, in the media and in law enforcement – viewed him as a menace.
As Hughes’ international fame grew, he was being denigrated as a subversive and a communist by his own government. Hughes had been under FBI surveillance since at least 1933, after he had traveled to Russia. Meanwhile his adamant calls for justice in the Scottsboro case of 1931 – when eight young black men were falsely accused of raping two white prostitutes – earned him the ire of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Hughes’ piercing critiques of capitalism didn’t help his cause, either. Hoover would go on to wage a personal vendetta against Hughes, building a 550-page file on him that highlighted poems like “Goodbye, Christ” as evidence of his communist sympathies.
Then, in 1953, Hughes was called to testify before Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who wanted to use Hughes’ previous support of communist causes and his supposedly subversive allegiances to target suspected “reds” in the State Department.
The man who was exalted by political leaders overseas, who found himself elbowing his way through throngs of adoring crowds abroad, was attacked as “un-American” by McCarthy’s Senate Subcommittee.
Hughes was understandably conflicted about his native country, and he explored this ambivalence in poems such as “Let America Be America Again”:
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
That last line still resonates for many Americans – for those who have never known a golden age, nor tasted the nation’s promise of dreams, justice and equality for all.
How long, Hughes wondered in “Harlem,” would we have to wait? And what was the cost of kicking the can down the road?
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Interestingly, Hughes had ended the first draft of this famous poem with the lines, “or does it atom-like explode / and leave deaths in its wake? Does it disappear / as might smoke somewhere?”
Writing on Aug. 7, 1948, the poet was keenly aware of what had happened only three years prior when nuclear bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
To me, this perfectly encapsulates Hughes’ international appeal. The poet sympathized with those who had felt the harshest wrath of American power and politics. His intended audience was never just his fellow Americans who were grappling with fear and anxiety; it was anyone who had suffered great and devastating loss – an anguish that knows no language or borders.
