Ashamed to Die: Silence, Denial, and the AIDS Epidemic in the South | Teaching for Change's Busboys and Poets Bookstore

Ashamed to Die: Silence, Denial, and the AIDS Epidemic in the South | Teaching for Change's Busboys and Poets Bookstore

Ashamed to Die: Silence, Denial, and the AIDS Epidemic in the South

Ashamed to Die: Silence, Denial, and the AIDS Epidemic in the South

Searching for home

Searching for home

Bowling Green, Ky, Aug. 15, 2011

Some people search for the next big thrill. Others for wealth – how much money can they earn in a year. Meanwhile, there are those whose lives are devoted to a search for meaning – the big questions. Where did it all begin? Why am I here? Where did I come from and where am I going? Is there really a god?

I am going to confess to some of those predilections. There’s an emptiness in all of us that needs to be filled. Few can boast of their cup perpetually running over.

That sensation of being satisfied is a rare gift.

My search is not for happiness, for gold, for acclaim. Mine is for home – for a sense of belonging. To lose the permanent stain of outsider in favor of the mantle of belonger. I don’t want to be an insider.

There’s no desire for me to furrow that deeply. I just one to belong - to feel as if I am exactly where I need to be and not try to be someplace else.

I was acutely reminded of that internal debate during two recent outings. The first was to the Gadsden Cultural Center in Quincy, Florida. I drove to the Cultural Center to see “Rich in Spirit,” an exhibit of artist Dean Mitchell’s work. Mitchell grew up black and poor in predominantly black Quincy. His work celebrates the people and places of his boyhood. His watercolors capture real life texture in ways no photograph can. They evoked a sense of place that teased my heart anew.

Recently as I drove from Bowling Green to Franklin, Kentucky, the route was marked by strip malls and chain restaurants and payday loan storefronts before giving way to cornfields with stalks as tall as giants. Silos stood over open fields like guards. Barns, their red paint stark and rich against a sea of green leaves, interrupt the flow. Even at 40 miles an hour, those images evoke a time and place that speaks to my heart, that beckons and seduces me. Is this the kind of place to find emotional solace? Can cornfields and red barns be the cure for my restlessness?

My greatest fear is that one locale will yield to another. This modern day nomad will continue looking for the next horizon. That the ache, the need, the yearning for home, will never end.

I suspect that I will never find home as long as I keep looking for it. Home needs to be in the here and now, where I am at that moment. That place is less geography but an emotional terrain, a spiritual place. When I find it my wanderings will cease. I’ll know it. I’ll feel as if I belong. There will be no boasting but a quiet affirmation that I’ve found it. When I do, I won’t ever let it go. I promise.

Sunday Journal: Teens' island romance made summer of 1978 magical - St. Petersburg Times

Sunday Journal: Teens' island romance made summer of 1978 magical - St. Petersburg Times

Lawrence of Jamaica: A touch of crass - Editorial - JamaicaObserver.com

Lawrence of Jamaica: A touch of crass - Editorial - JamaicaObserver.com

Becoming an American

ATLANTA 2000 - My journey ended Friday.

Following four years of bureaucratic bottlenecks and political delays, the floodgates to citizenship had finally been flung open for me. In a matter of minutes, I completed my cultural and intellectual transformation that began on a December night in 1984. I became a U.S. citizen, a proud American. I joined more than 190 other immigrants in the ground-level auditorium of the Richard B. Russell Federal Building in Atlanta and took the Oath of Allegiance.

"I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty," I read aloud from the written oath issued to each of us.

"I will bear arms on behalf of the United States I will perform noncombatant service in the armed forces when required. I will perform work of national importance."

Each line I read amplified a commitment that had been made unconsciously in my heart years ago but was now written in ink. Each pledge reminded me that the promise of America was not just in the opportunity and freedom she offered immigrants like me but in the responsibility that we new citizens have to ensure the door remains open for those who will follow.

I felt the cloak of citizenship weighing on my shoulders. It was a burden I was proud to bear. And, looking around the auditorium, I knew that sentiment was unanimous. Friday morning's gathering was part of the Immigration and Naturalization Service's massive push to swear in 1.3 million new citizens by Sept. 30, 2000.

Similar ceremonies were taking place in South Carolina and throughout the country. Like those other ceremonies, ours was filled with natives of India, Vietnam, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Surinam, El Salvador, Mexico, Canada and Greece -- all soon-to-be Americans drawn to this country by dreams of opportunity.

Each person waiting to be sworn in had a different story -- a unique path that brought them to this place. Yet everyone in the room, regardless of language, culture or religion, shared a common destination. The concept of citizenship holds rich meaning for immigrants. They may pay taxes and live lives of civic responsibility, but citizenship promises to fulfill their desire for access and opportunity.

It means the right to vote, to serve as jurors, to fight -- and die -- for their adopted homeland. It offers membership in a culture that is envied and copied around the world. Many of the new citizens I met in Atlanta had applied within the last year or two. Not me -- my application was first submitted in 1996 in New Jersey. Subsequent moves to Charlotte and then to York County pushed my application to the bottom of the pile. Eighteen months ago, in desperation I asked U.S. Rep. John Spratt's office to intervene. Through Spratt's office I learned that the INS had lost my application. I had to produce copies of my petition and show a canceled check to prove I had paid the $95 fee. Failure to produce the document could have delayed my citizenship application even further. Thus, with my application revived, I received a trail of correspondence during the last 12 months from the INS: requests for fingerprints in Charlotte, an interview appointment in Greer, and finally, a swearing-in date at a location 220 miles away in Atlanta.

Friday's ceremony marked the end of a long journey for myself and for dozens like me. As we rose to take the Oath of Allegiance, beside me stood Henry Romero, a 24-year-old construction foreman from El Salvador.

In 1987, Romero flew to the United States to join his parents, who were among the thousands of El Salvadorian refugees that had fled the murderous civil war in their homeland. On Friday, dressed in a beige sport coat and matching pants, Romero took his place in the nation of Americans.

"I want the right to vote. That's the important thing," said Romero, who lives in Lawrenceville, Ga. Romero believes that voting is a right not appreciated enough by his neighbors. "Americans -- they don't know what they are missing," he said.

Immigrants will sometimes speak of "they" to refer to native-born Americans, those whose birthright has spared them the indignity of standing in the "alien" line at airports or waiting before dawn outside an INS office, only to be sent home for yet another document.

"A lot of people don't think about the pressure," Romero said. Then he cherished a new realization: "This is the last time I have to walk into an INS building."

A few rows from where Romero and I stood, Donna Butler Williams, a physical education teacher from Summerville, was also becoming an American. For the native of Canada and Winthrop University graduate, citizenship means not having to worry about her retirement benefits.

"I didn't want to work all these years and retire and not reap all my benefits," said Williams, expressing a common concern for immigrants. Many worry that changes in immigration law could restrict social security and other benefits to non-citizens, even those who have lived and worked in the United States for years.

Williams' family settled in Hilton Head when she was in junior high. After 28 years, she said she already felt like an American.

"I've been here that long," she said.

In the next row was Edet Ikpeme, who came to America from Nigeria to attend Northeastern University in Boston 20 years ago. In 1998, he decided it was time for him to become a U.S. citizen.

"I've been living here so long, I might as well become one," said Ikpeme. With a wife, an eight-month-old baby and a promising career as a quality assurance analyst in Atlanta, Ikpeme's American dream was still incomplete. He couldn't vote; he wasn't a citizen. "It felt like unfinished business," Ikpeme said.

Minutes later, after all the oaths had been said, citizenship certificates distributed and family pictures taken, Ikpeme and the rest of us new citizens walked out into the midmorning sunlight and blended into the pedestrian traffic of downtown Atlanta.

Each of us clutched our citizenship papers with the certainty that our place in America had been legally secured.

Baptism at Wakulla Springs

An afternoon at Wakulla Springs

One of the earliest lessons children in Florida learn is that swimming in fresh water can be dangerous. Beware of the alligators signs are everywhere. But the Sunshine state is also blessed with more than six hundred fresh water springs, some of which are open for swimming and communing with nature. Andrew Skerritt recounts his first visit to Wakulla Springs, located deep in the forests of North Florida.

Baptism at Wakulla Springs

Every cell in my body seems to protest as I step gingerly into Wakulla Springs. The average water temperature is about sixty-eight degrees, but on a steamy-hot Florida afternoon, it feels near freezing. But I’ve come twenty miles from home in Tallahassee; it’s too late to turn back. It’s time to be baptized into one of the deepest and largest freshwater springs in the world.

To read and hear the complete essay, visit Living On Earth at www.loe.org

Montego Bay state of Mind

A languid common-ness. That was my first impression on setting foot in Montego Bay, Jamaica, one November afternoon. Cars zipped by. Pedestrians strolled at that easy, unhurried, 'no problem' pace. School children in uniform walked by in twos and threes. They could have been from anywhere in the Caribbean. From one island to the next, the rhythm always seemed to be the same. Easy does it. But Montego Bay though with its history, the colonial architecture, the market place, the waterfront, the food, the people, all represent a world worth discovering. Stay tuned.

Meditations on voices of a common tongue

Melda oh you making wedding plans

Carrying me name to obeah man

All you do, you can’t get through

I still ain’t goin married to you.

Obeah Wedding - Mighty Sparrow

The crowd sang in unison, its partially inebriated state adding folly to the chorus. Singers crooned at the top of their untrained and unrehearsed voices. But they maintained the tune of the almost drunk. But their oneness came from much more than the sharing of imbibed and imbued spirits. They spoke the same language. Not just English or some dialect thereof.

In singing that song on that Saturday night in Atlanta, those of a particular generation demonstrated a shared oneness, the things that keep them united, that draws them like black sand soldiers to a steel magnet from cities far and near.

It defines who they are and always will be. It is the shared language of the exile. For them, distance from home is calculated not by time and space but by memory. Theirs is a shared memory of a time and place, when and where they listened to the same songs, heard the same stories, believed in the same rituals. The words evoke particular images of a particular time and place. That stamps them as a member of a particular tribe. The name of their tribe distinguishes them by geography and history, but also biology and anthropology.

Their song is one of longing, a desire for home, to belong even when they don't. It is a cry of affirmation. To see them is not to know them, but to hear them is to begin to understand them. But only just a little. For understanding takes time, requires patience, and a generous portion of honesty and introspection. People from a small place they are. And always will be.

Going Home-A remembrance of things past

from the archives

Under the ash, home
By ANDREW J. SKERRITT
Published January 8, 2004

OLVESTON, Montserrat - I finally went home again. Eight years after my last visit, I walked down the gangway of the Opale Express, an Australian-built catamaran, and stepped on the concrete jetty.


Ahead of me the landscape rose sharply in parched bluffs and rock outcroppings. Wooden shacks lined the road from the waterfront. Unfamiliar faces greeted me at the customs house.


My return home was a familiar ritual, to bury family, my father. But on that placid October afternoon, none of that mattered. I was home, even if home was a vastly different place.


Montserrat, the 38-square-mile island where I grew up, had been sliced in two when the volcano rumbled to life in July 1995. It uprooted most of my relatives, friends and former neighbors. Some of them stayed on the island, but most left. You can find them mostly on the streets and in double-decker buses in London, Birmingham, Leicester and Manchester, England, or in New York and Miami.


Those who remained inhabit a truncated world of exclusion and safe zones, ash gray and tropical green, fear and hope.

Click here to read the entire article
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/01/08/Floridian/Under_the_ash__home.shtml

Geoffrey Philp's Blog Spot: Lorna Goodison: One of the Best Writers You’ve Never Read

Geoffrey Philp's Blog Spot: Lorna Goodison: One of the Best Writers You’ve Never Read

Bread A Lifelong Love Affair

Hot Bread: A love story.

A journey of the senses..

Tampa, Fla

The red light seemed to take forever to turn green. I tapped my right foot on the brake pedal, impatient to reach home. On the passenger seat next to me sat a long white package. With the windows rolled up on a cool Florida evening, the air inside my car was saturated with the irresistible aroma of hot bread. I reached my right hand over to the passenger seat and touched the white wrapping from Mauricio’s Bakery. Home was less than five minutes away, but as the aroma of hot bread filled my car, it seduced me; I couldn’t hold out that long. With one hand on the steering wheel, I balanced the three-foot long loaf on my knee and broke off the heel, poking the soft moist bread into my mouth. I chewed, swallowed and bit again. I savored the hot soft white loaf, present and past converged, realizing that much of my culinary life was spent in a pursuit of hot bread, butter a must, with cheese if necessary. I’d prefer some butter but savored the warm moist loaf. Within minutes I pulled into the driveway. Bread and butter and meatloaf. Before the night was over, all that was left of the loaf of bread were the crumbs scattered on the granite counter top.