The drive up from New Bedford to Cambridge this afternoon was a real summer drive. The car was already hot from the sun. Driving with the windows rolled down didn’t cool it down much. Even though it wasn’t that hot today — only up in the eighties — I thought I could feel my head getting hot from the sun beating on the roof of the car. My shirt was damp with perspiration. I’m not used to the heat yet, and I swear I got a headache from the heat. But in a month or less, a day like today will seem cool and comfortable.
Category Archives: Sense of place
Summer in the city
Walking down the sidewalk on a hot summer you day, you see small red and black splotches. Look up: it’s a mulberry tree, and if you’re lucky there will be ripe mulberries within reach, and you can pop one in your mouth for a burst of tart and slightly foxy flavor.
But when I looked up, the only berries within reach were red or white, underripe. Higher up, out of reach, were the deep red and black mulberries. Someone had gotten to the tree before me.
Spring watch
Carol and I walked out to the end of State Pier in New Bedford Harbor yesterday, and stood there watching some fishing boats leaving port. We were chatting about something when we were surprised by a splash in the water behind us.
“What was that?”
A hundred feet out in the harbor, we could see ripples and small splashes, and then something big rolled up out of the water and splashed.
“Looks like some big predator fish chasing a school of small bait fish,” I said. I thought maybe they were bluefish, but I’m not a saltwater angler, so I wouldn’t know for sure. Bluefish (Pomatomus saltatrix) winter in Florida, migrate north, and hit the Massachusetts coast sometime in June, but I think of them as arriving later than June 8.
Today when I went out for a walk, I ran into Michael, the librarian at the Whaling Museum Research Library. He was headed across the bridge to Fairhaven, as I was, so we walked along together. On the bridge between Pope’s Island and Fish Island, he stopped and pointed out at the harbor at some ripples and small splashes, and every once in a while something big rolling up out of the water.
“Bluefish,” he said. “They’re up in the harbor already.”
He’s a saltwater fisherman, so I’ll take his word that these were blues. Their arrival means that springtime is almost over.
Race? Ethnicity? (Cape what?)
Back in 1981, a group of New Bedford residents got together and created a book called Spinner. Inspired by the “Foxfire” books from Georgia, the staff of Spinner collected lore, legends, and oral histories from older residents of the city. Five volumes eventually got published, the latest in 1995.
I came across the first volume of Spinner at Upstair Used Books, on Pleasant Street in downtown New Bedford. I went in and asked Ira, who owns Upstair Used Books, if he had any books on local history. “Oh sure,” he said, “I’ve got a couple of copies of the first volume of Spinner.”
The essay that really caught my attention was an interview with Lucy Ramos titled “Black, White, or Poruguese?: A Cape Verdean Dilemma.” Here are some excerpts from this interview:
Being a Cape Verdean is special to me and to my children even more so — because we’re a potpourri really, we’re a mixture of people. We have both European and African influence. When I was younger our country was still ruled by the Portuguese government, so we’ve gone through some changes, you know. When we were young we were Portuguese because that was our mother country, and the we went through the Black part of our lives in the sixties. And now I think we finally know who and what we are, which is Cape Verdean, and it is something special. And we are different, we’re different from the American Blacks and we’re different from the Whites. We’ve taken from both cultures and that makes us unique….
Here in New Bedford, you know, we just kind of accepted the fact that we were Cape Verdean and that everybody knew what that meant. But when Cape Verdeans began to go away from the community, they began to have problems.
For instance, one of my sons was in the ROTC and they travel a lot. Everywhere he went he would say, “My name is Ramos,” and everybody thought he was Spanish. And he would say, “No, I’m Cape Verdean.” “What’s a Cape Verdean?” they would all ask, so it became a thing to be able to tell them where the islands were, that we had our own language and dialect, had our own foods, music, and culture.
The older people may still say “We’re Portuguese”; that is how they were raised. But I think the New Bedford Portuguese always objected to us saying we were Portuguese, because they felt we really weren’t. And so we always had this little slight conflict. Now I think we have our own identity and we’re not Portuguese and we know it. But I think it was important in particular for our children to know this. Especially after the Black Crisis we went through. I think our children needed to know that they have their own culture and their own heritage. They don’t have to borrow from the Portuguese or anyone else….
In the sixties we had lots of problems here locally with the labels “Black” and “White.” You see, up till then the kids identified themselves as Cape Verdean. But at that point they had to take a stand, especially in high school. You were either Black or you were White, there was no in-between. So you had to decide then, “Am I a Black or am I a White?” and nobody wanted to hear whether you were Cape Verdean or not. The kids had a difficult time then because they had to make that decision.
People may not understand this, but it was very difficult because Cape Verdeans come in shades from pure white to ebony black. For instance when my kids were going to the Greene School, the teacher would identify the child’s race by looking at him. I had three sons all in the school at the same time. I was a carpet joke because I have three sons three shades; and one teacher identified one boy as Black, one teacher identified one as White, and one was identified as Mulatto. So I have three children identified as three different races….
I think the majority of kids now are coming around to saying they are Cape Verdean. But if it is a choice of identifying White of Black, I think they would choose Black. I think it was more difficult for the older ones, the parents and the grandparents, to accept that their children identified as Black. Some of the kids were even dropping the Cape Verdean altogether and it was just Black. There was lots of peer pressure, and they felt you couldn’t be in-between, you had to be one or the other, and if the color of your skin wasn’t pure white, that didn’t give you much choice to begin with anyway.
This essay caught my attention not only because it tells about a moment in time when racial categories shifted and forced some people to have to claim a new racial identity.
As a result of reading this one short interview, I’ve added another long book to my summer reading list: Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860-1965 by Marilyn Halter (University of Illinois, 1993) — when I finish reading it, I’ll post a summary of this book here. I think there are some fascinating implications for the ways we perceive and construct racial identities here in the United States.
Parade
Around noontime, Carol went up to watch the Memorial Day parade here in New Bedford.
“How was it?” I asked when she got back.
“It was fine,” she said. “Some people walked down all the way from Buttonwood Park alongside the parade. You should have gone.”
“I suppose I should have,” I said.
She started eating watermelon. “I figured that as long as some kid from New Bedford died in Iraq, I should at least go to the Memorial Day parade,” she added. “Actually, I didn’t realize it, but four kids from New Bedford have died in the war.”
I felt a little guilty that I hadn’t gone. “Four from New Bedford?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “One of their fathers was there. He stood up next to the mayor. He didn’t speak, but it looked like he was maybe crying a little.”
I guess I really should have gone to the Memorial Day parade. Sadly, because this war shows no signs of ending, when I do go to the parade next year there will probably be some more New Bedford kids who have died in Iraq.
Post cards
Blogger “UU Enforcer” has started up a fascinating new blog. It turns out he has a large collection of old post cards and other vintage images depicting Unitarian and Universalist churches. He’s been scanning his collection little by little, and posting the scans to his new blog. Most of the images are from the first half of the 20th C., depicting churches from Florida to the midwest to New England. His most recent post has wonderful steroscopic views of the interiors of two Universalist churches in Lowell, Mass. Link.
Be warned — he posts high-resolution images directly to the blog, so if you have a dial-up Internet connection it could take an hour to download one blog page.
On the rooftops
The rooftops of downtown New Bedford host a Herring Gull nesting colony. Yesterday and today I went searching for gull nests. I climbed up onto the roof of First Unitarian church, roamed the top deck of the Elm St. parking garage, stuck my head out of one of the skylights in our apartment, and poked around into a small urban park, and the video has footage from all four places.
If you prefer to download a Quicktime movie, click here.
Yesterday while I was shooting video up on the parking garage, I wound up talking with one of the people who works at the parking garage. Last year, they had a dozen nests up there, and the Herring Gulls made something of a nuisance of themselves. This year, he’s up on the top deck every day, sweeping out nesting material before the gulls get a chance to get settled in. “Just call me an apex predator,” he said.
One final note to those of you who are birders — I’m pretty sure I saw nesting Great Black-Backed Gulls from the roof of the Elm St. Parking Garage, but they were far enough away that you’d need a scope to be sure. They were on a building just about due east from the parking garage.
More research needed
In tonight’s class for the Underground Railroad Tour Guide training at the New Bedford Historical Society, our teacher Joan Beauboin turned to me and said, “Reverent Harper [I can’t get her to call me “Dan”], you’ll be interested to know that Reverend William Jackson was converted to Unitarianism when — what was her name, now, something Watkins Harper….”
Surprised, I said, “Frances Watkins Harper came to New Bedford?”
Frances Harper was a well-known African American woman who joined the Unitarian church in Philadelphia in 1870, having been attracted to Unitarianism by the many Unitarian abolitionists she had met. Rev. William Jackson was the African American minister of the Second and Salem Baptist churches in New Bedford, known as the fugitive slave’s churches.
“Indeed she did,” said Joan Beauboin. “And she managed to convince William Jackson that he was really a Unitarian.”
Still surprised, I said, “But which church did he join? He didn’t join First Unitarian, did he?” In the second half of the 19th C., the Unitarian church in New Bedford had many of the most powerful and influential and wealthy white New Bedfordites as members; it was very much a white church.
“Well, I don’t know if he actually joined the church,” she admitted. “Perhaps he just considered himself a Unitarian.”
I find it hard to believe that socially-conscious First Unitarian Church would have allowed an African American to rent a pew or otherwise become a formal member. But even if Rev. William Jackson wasn’t a member of First Unitarian, he would have been the most prominent person of color in 19th C. New Bedford to have called himself a Unitarian. This is definitely going to call for more research on my part….
In the State House
Today was the third anniversary of the court decision that affirmed the right of same-sex couples to marry under the constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry (RCFM) decided to hold a little ceremony at the State House in Boston. For the past ten years, RCFM has been gathering signatures on a declaration for same-sex marriage rights (the Massachusetts Delaration of Religious Support for the Freedom of Same-Gender Couples To Marry), asking clergypersons and representatives from congregations to sign. Over the past few months, RCFM made a big push and got a total of 999 signatures; they saved the one thousandth signature for today’s ceremony.
I got to the State House at a couple of minutes before eleven. I remembered to leave my pocket knife at home, so I got through the metal detectors quickly. Then I headed up to Nurses Hall (dedicated to Civil War Nurses from Massachusetts), which was pretty nearly full of RCFM supporters. Massachusetts being the kind of place it is, I looked around for people I knew. Across the crowd, the Unitarian Universalist minister in Medford caught my eye and waved. I made my way through the crowd to chat. Hank was there with Adam, the Unitarian Universalist minister from Natick, and John, an Episcopal priest, and David from the Unitarian Universalist Assocation. Hank and Adam both looked very Bostonian — Hank in a dark pinstripe suit with a white shirt and a red tie, Adam looking very natty in a seersucker sport coat and khakis.
“Hank, I’ve gotta hand it to you,” I said. “You’re standing on the correct side of the cameras” — a few videocameras on tripods faced a lectern — “and you’re wearing a power tie.” Hank grew up in the state and went to U Mass Amherst, which also means he probably knows half the people working in the State House.
Adam and Hank told me they would have to leave a little early. “We’re going to the annual meeting of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to the Indians,” Adam said. “You’re kidding,” I said, “that’s still in existence?” They informed me that the Society, founded in the Colonial era, still disburses money from their endowment to good causes, particularly to Native Americans in the state.
Then the RCFM speakers began. The original signers of the Declaration were recognized; the outgoing director of RCFM spoke; the incoming director spoke; a rabbi (whose name I missed) had us all say “Mazel tov!” to celebrate three years of same-sex marriage; and then Deval Patrick appeared unexpectedly.
Patrick briefly spoke to us, talking about the importance of protecting civil rights. “If we had voted on Brown vs. Board of Education,” he said, “Board of Education would have won, given the sentiments of the time.” Patrick was accompanied by House Speaker Sal DiMasi, who spoke about the importance of leaving the state constitution unchanged so we can maintain the right of same-sex marriage. And then Senate President Therese Murray came down the steps from her office, and she spoke, too. “I heard all the noise, and I couldn’t get any work done,” she said, “so I thought I’d better come down.”
(Patrick, Di Masi, and Murray do not look like politicians, they actually look like real people. You can tell Patrick comes from the wealthy Boston suburbs — wearing and immaculate suit and gorgeous yellow silk tie, he speaks standard College-Educated English. Sal Di Masi, representing Third Suffolk (i.e., Boston), is a classic Boston politician, a product of Boston College and Suffolk University Law School who speaks with a good solid Boston accent. Therese Murray represents southeastern Massachusetts, far from the centers of power in Boston’s suburbs — she looked like an ordinary working person, slightly rumpled from sitting at a desk, some roots showing. Compared to the interchangeable, indistinguishable white-men-in-dark-suits of the Republican presidential debate, these three Massachusetts politicians looked like human beings instead of Muppets.)
Oh, and somewhere in between the unexpected appearance of politicians, the the Right Reverend Gayle Harris of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts became the one thousandth signer of the Declaration. Having her was the one thousandth signer was a powerful statement in a number of subtle ways. First and foremost, Episcopalians in Massachusetts still include many of the wealthiest, most powerful people and families — so they’re definitely not some tiny powerless minority group, religiously and politically. Then there’s all the fuss the worldwide Anglican communion is having over same-sex marriage, there’s some risk in what Ms. Harris did. Then there’s the fact that Ms. Harris is African American, which helps remind us that this is a civil rights issue. It didn’t hurt that Ms. Harris is a powerful speaker — someday, I’d love to go hear her preach.
By this point, the whole event was hopelessly behind schedule. Adam and Hank slipped out at ten minutes to noon, when half the scheduled speakers hadn’t yet spoken. We heard some speakers from the United Church of Christ (UCC) and Unitarian Universalist (UU) speakers. RCFM probably has more UCC and UU ministers and congregations than any other denomination (but I have to admit that the oratorical abilities of the UCC and UU ministers were not up to the level of the other clergy who spoke). The camera crews left as soon as the politicians left, and now the reporters and still photographers started to leave as well. I had only allotted an hour in my schedule for this event, so I slipped out at two minutes to noon.