Jury Duty. I know none of us enjoy it but as a citizen who takes citizenship as seriously as the anger that a visit to Ellis Island to hear tales of forefathers coming to America can bring. When you know that these paths to citizenship were not quite how it was for your own ancestors, it is more bitter than sweet. To make matters worse, it is a murder trial and all parties involved are young black or Hispanic youth. Knowing this may take a few weeks, I grabbed a few books that I bought but never really read on the, “one day later on in life I will actually read that book” tip. In the Jury Deliberation Room, the sixteen strangers that will soon become my fellow jurors and I realized early on that the “one day later on in life” had come. We started reading whatever we brought because all the wildness witnessed in the courtroom could not be talked about and it was only day one.
I would eventually read three books during my duty: Their Eyes Were Watching God and Mules and Men by Zora Neale Hurston and Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert. I had the Heretics of Dune book because, strangest thing, one of my fellow jury duty reportees had it and as we all sat that first day through drawn-out videos and procedures from 8am to 4pm I had nothing to read and was bored to DEATH! But I like Herbert’s Dune Chronicles and had not read this one so I was pleased when my fellow juror took pity on me. The Hurston works were easier to note. I bought (yeah I said bought) the special edition of Their Eyes were Watching God after not watching the television presentation. I figured the book had to be good because the television presentation was just that bad. It turned out that I was correct in my assessment, but it was Hurston’s other book that caught me. It contained a list of Harlem slang terms and definitions listed in alphabetical order. If you get this book and turn to page 228 you will see a few terms that, as I sat on this trial and heard testimony of who saw what when the shots rang out, who made the 9-11 call, who got shot and who died out of this group of six teenagers walking back from the store with ingredients for Christmas dinner, made me pause.
The term Aunt Hagar’s Chillun meant “Negro race.” My aunt was saying that it was a biblical term and Aunt Hagar was the servant that Abraham laid down and had children with before God said his barren wife would bear him offspring. Aunt Hagar’s children were thus outcast and scorned- if I got it right. Hmm. Religious justification (Bible) plus Africans (slaves) equals emergent language with loaded interpretation and as the African slaves lost more and more of their African-ness for American-ness, this term came to represent a logical progression. Aunt Hagar’s Chillun is a fitting term for those that the conquering Europeans, I mean Americans, had brutally dehumanized, traumatized and enslaved using their twisted religious interpretations for justification. Americans used the Bible to justify their atrocities then forced the enslaved to adopt it. Let me be honest. Everyone wants to see themselves in their religion and the only people in the Bible that the enslaved could see themselves in were Hagar’s children. It makes perfect sense. Who else would consider themselves that? They were considered equal to livestock, livestock. What is a worse curse than that?
All Aunt Hagar’s Children also happens to be the title of Edward P. Jones’ new collection of stories. I had already read and reviewed Jones’ stories (see Sliced Fruit Issue #13) but now, the title made sense. All of the characters were born into, or grew up right after, slavery and they were beginning to realize how little it is they knew about getting ahead or just getting to “ok.” Yeah they knew about holding a job but it was more so the emerging consciousness of realizing that you have problems but knowing absolutely no one who knows how to solve them. Jones’ stories capture the helplessness and hopelessness of realization.
Strange. How many African-Americans come from families like some of these characters? There is the married woman with child who realizes that she doesn’t want to be married but has no idea what she really wants. Or the convicted killer who shuns his family because he doesn’t even know how to feel anymore. Even the ex-military brother who becomes a detective and the whole time he works his case he dreams of escaping to Alaska. Aunt Hagar’s Children is us and, for the most part, we still have problems and scars that we have not faced. Granted, through education many have risen above the hopelessness displayed in Jones’ work but sitting in that courtroom it was also obvious many had not. And as messed up as it is, we still have a long way to go before Aunt Hagar’s Chillun get straight. And it starts with literacy, specifically our history, and it does not stop until we are all on the same page again like we were in the 60’s with civil rights. |
