Random headline that blows my mind: "Reggaetón in Iraqi Kurdistan"!
Completely Unrelated and Meandering Thoughts...
In To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (1997), Tera W. Hunter describes and comments on scenes of urban freedwomen in 1866: “These black women strolling the streets of Atlanta were playfully constructing new identities that overturned notions of racial inferiority and that could only be interpreted by many white Southerners as signs of African aesthetics run amok” (2-3).
In my corner of Rogers Park, aesthetics run amok across cultures, from Krishnas to hip-hoppers to Mexican cowboys. Sometimes, the playful constructions become obnoxious, tacky and too loud, rank even.
(Note: Me too! My soundtrack for this writing is the NorTec Collective, "Tijuana Sessions" Vol. 3 — norteña + banda + techno = NORTEC!)
Within the wash of noise and neon, I catch the Clark 22 bus and doze off for a few minutes, thinking about my Grandma’s washing machine on some hot Texas morning years away.
“The high visibility of laundry workers in black communities is illustrated by the prominent location of the wash tub…Laundry work was critical to the process of community-building because it encouraged women to work together in communal spaces within their neighborhoods, fostering informal networks of reciprocity that sustained them through health and sickness, love and heartaches, birth and death” (Hunter 62).
My Grandma’s washing machine sat in the kitchen, a quick walk from the backyard clothesline. Washes usually started after breakfast and went through the afternoon. Perched over the chugging and sputtering machine lid, I would watch the water fill and let steam collect on my face.
I’ve rarely known such peace since then.
“The intimacy of laundry work inspired unity, but it could also produce friction…” (Hunter 63).
Grandpa worked next-door fixing shoes, and I spent most of my time by Grandma, sometimes helping her stick our wash with wooden pins on a ragged rope-line. She once threatened to hang me there with the clothes.
Thankfully, she was a good Baptist and spared me for church on Sunday.
“Periodic revivals, most frequent during the summer, played especially important functions in spiritual rejuvenation…” (Hunter 68).
Grandma's preparation of our clothes bespoke religious care in work that parched and pleated her hands, wrinkled palms for slapping and praying.
It all sounds familiar to me: “African-American communities embodied the full range of human emotions, behaviors, and differences; they were not utopian or monolithic societies. Quarrels, as much as harmony, were signs of passionate interpersonal relationships” (Hunter 89).
We even had a devil at our dancehall down in Texas, as the polka or even the waltz could “reveal the power of dancing as a cultural form and the way it embodied (literally and figuratively) racial, class, and sexual tensions…” (Hunter 171).
Speaking of devils, I asked my dad the other day if he’d read any Cormac McCarthy, and he mentioned the following in an e-mail, upon skimming a synopsis of Blood Meridian: “the Texas that you grew up in was very different from the one I was raised in, and it was even worse when Grandpa first went there in 1924. In 1924 it was open season on Mexicans. Mexicans could only live and work in certain areas. A Mexican that was out after dark took his life in his own hands. The Texas Rangers could kill a Mexican for any reason, or no reason.”
Dad continued: “I think that the word that I have been called was 'Mess-in-a-Can’! I have been called all kinds of things, including ‘Nigger’. Since I have been here in Georgia, I guess many of them can't make out what I am, [and so] I have been called a ‘Foreigner’ by both Blacks and Whites.”
(Note: "Mexi-Skins" is a delicious potato-and-pepper appetizer at one of my favorite North Side pizzerias.)
I’m reminded for some reason of Grossman’s Land of Hope and how the Chicago Defender refused the term “Negro” and instead referred to blacks as The Race.
Que Viva la Raza…?
The Texas I know and love kills all races. Maybe not equally. One day from a gurney, maybe the next from a pick-up truck.
And so, Cormac McCarthy's primal, bloodthirsty premise seems a like assessment: "They fight with fists, with feet, with bottles or knives. All races, all breeds. Men whose speech sounds like the grunting of apes" (Blood Meridian).
P.S.
Now go Google "MEXI-SKIN"!!!