MUSHROOMS CAN RAISE FLAGSTONES

 “Life is at best a nebulous shadow, a vague contingency, the merest of possibilities to begin with.”  -Soledad Brother, The Prison Letters of George Lester Jackson 

     Lifted from their Wikipedia pages the demographics of Goshen, NY are 0.14% African American, Montgomery 0.25%, and bringing up the rear the “affluent,” village of Lenox, Mass. with 0.08% black residents. Yet, all these tiny villages had black “settlements” at some point in their histories. In fact many small northeastern communities like Goshen, Montgomery, Auburn or Lenox, Mass., contained tiny populations of just a few black families, and felt compelled to separate them into so-called settlements. They then gave these enclaves, of only few houses, names like Auburn’s “New Guinea,” or Montgomery’s “Buffalo Hill,”….or worse. The practice of framing these few black households as autonomous entities is indicative of a wider societal issue. Ghettoization has long been a mainstay of containment and control over a disenfranchised caste. Such practices can be amplified, diluted and purposefully confused in the large urban context, but in the suburbs and countryside they are easy to isolate and examine.

     In Lenox it was the Osterhout, Egbert and VanDerZee compound- only three houses set up to service the Gilded Age. I’m sure the white townsfolk had another name for it. David Osterhout was a sexton at Lenox’s Church on the Hill, a predominantly white congregation and like my grandfather, was a janitor. In Auburn, where William Henry Seward would wind up, an old map of the “negro settlement” of “New Guinea” shows a thin, pie shaped sliver of land containing just seven structures along the Owasco Outlet. This ghetto was penned in by the river, and Mechanic and Mill streets, it’s isolation concrete and blatant. Montgomery’s nob of “Buffalo Hill” was literally across the tracks.

      I’d rather not be held responsible for the pervasiveness of racist violence, sexual harassment, mass incarceration, micro-aggression, drug addiction, toxic masculinity, gender discrimination, alcohol abuse, identity politics, or the omnipresence of Dollar General stores across the American landscape, but there’s no getting around it. Guilty as charged! I swore I’d never be one of those people who gave a shit about where or from whom I was issued. But, there you have it. Seems all I have to do is so swear, then dive in, breaking my own rules….. the nativist Osterhouts and Jennings ARE to blame for way more than I ever thought possible, shame fusing with a perversely qualified pride.

    Reading these rural histories I’m beginning to become aware….. just beginning…… and it’s not pretty. The madness of the times (ours and theirs) is palpable.

      We are still stuck in a racially segregated (physically and mentally) caste system- especially in the countryside. Due to my devotion to this “place,” I have only a very few friends of color in my upstate congregation. Almost all my friends and neighbors are white or Hispanic. At least four of my black neighbors (in a very small area) have either died or moved out as real estate prices have steadily risen in the twenty five years I’ve lived here. I’m part of the problem, consciously drawing attention to this hidden penetralia with my absurd church and lawn sculptures. Someday Glen Wild will have a Wikipedia page and a graph of racial percentages. I’d vote for more black, but to remedy a drought of ethnic diversity with a proactive racial mandate is to fall into the predictable trap of missionary zeal and destructive mismanagement. You can’t go out and purposefully make black friends and neighbors just to balance out the racial disparity in your life; not without looking like a complete fucking idiot. 

     An unsuspecting black family can show up to a Catskill barbecue and be so overwhelmed with well meaning white people wanting to “hang out” or “get to know” them I’m sure it has the same effect as being snubbed by a racist cracker. The harried guests run for their lives. It’s off putting, but, it can be explained. This overboard friendliness is a byproduct of today’s re-awakened, rampant racism, a need to overcompensate, in this post-United Colors world, for our less enlightened racist brethren. Ham handed and clumsy as our attempts at inclusion are, we mean well. Please come back. Give us another chance…..             

      As Francis Jennings points out in regard to the European invasion, “When Indians granted or sold land, the territory became European forever.” Cycles of development and blight may still occur, but once the big money backed up by civil authority comes in, indigenous or communities of color are forced out and remain diasporas. The little Catskill village of Mountain dale is experiencing a similar renewal process that may or may not be beneficial to its residents. I have a sculpture park on the edge of town that has been hit with graffiti twice. According to the guy who mows the lawn, “Everybody hates your art.” My issues with small pieces of property and lack of appreciation continue.     

     Race and confinement also permeates all that I’m reading. I’m a lot of fun. I’m trying to catch up, tenaciously re-educating myself, painfully unlearning, coming to grips with my (our) past. My eyes are being pried open. Never too late. Now that we are seriously considering reparations for slavery, I may someday have to financially atone for every slave owned and apostasy committed by my ancestors. From what I’ve discovered so far I better start saving up.

     Jack Hodges lived amongst and apart from the Wisners, Clintons, Jennings and Sewards, in Orange County. He drank with them, worked for them, fucked them, and even went to church with them, (there weren’t any black churches upstate in 1818) but he was never accepted by them. During his time in Orange County Jack slept in the Seward barn, visited Hanna Teed, or found a friendly bed in one of the many black households in various “negro settlements.” When he was hired on by Teed and Conklin to kill one of their own he got the white townsfolk’s undivided attention and a cold cell in the Goshen gaol. But before C.B. Durland delivered Jack Hodges to Ainsi Ball, a friendly Seward slave smuggled the prisoner a handkerchief containing one warm pancake.