Joey Cloudy online

Isaiah Jones vs. the Sea:

Juneteenth 2021 Homecoming: “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery”

June 19th, 2021, Galveston, Texas/Potters Field

‘Once in a Lifetime’
“You may ask yourself, ‘What is that beautiful house?’
You may ask yourself, ‘Where does that highway go to?’
And you may ask yourself, ‘Am I right, am I wrong?’
And you may say to yourself, ‘My God, what have I done?’”
— Talking Heads

Isaiah chose to start his solo sail to Ghana from Galveston for a reason. He was retracing the route of the Atlantic Slave Trade in reverse in space and time on his journey and this was the last place to free their slaves a year after the civil war three years after the signing of the emancipation proclamation. Penny drove Aeon down to visit her neighbor and she was her chauffer she knew that Aeon had a school girl crush on her when she first met her 3 years ago when she worked as the families au pair keeping and eye on their high functioning autistic sun and his best friend and neighbor Aeon.

They had only been dating for a few weeks and now they were here in Galveston with her as the unofficial videographer. Penny hated not having anything to do so she suggested they come out and make a tape about the areas history after talking to Aeon and Izzy about the history of Juneteenth last night over dinner. The entire thing was all the result of a grant proposal Isaiah wrote when he was only seven. That was the year he took over managing his parents investments.

The grant was the only way he could think of to finance the voyage. He had no trouble getting financing once he wrote up his prospectus and sent it to not just the usual university soft touches for funding but put an add in the sailing magazines seeking sponsors for his idea. The money came immediately with the stipulation that since the youngest sailor was no longer a category in the Guinness Book of Worlds Records and for insurance purposes that he wait until he was 16 before setting sail. He has been getting ready for this for the last nine years. He obsessed in that way that only a precocious child can and become an expert on a field as a child he did not have a dinosaur phase he only cared about sailing.

He studied history in a detached way his thinking inverted autistic processing from the top down rather than the bottom up. The scaffolding of his emotional matrix was impenetrable to most but it was there just the same. He read the old slavers journals as well as the letters and diaries of Jefferson Davis who despite being the president of the Confederacy was not a white supremacist. He wrote in his letters that he did not believe in the inherent superiority in any manor of the white man over the colored man. For he had slaves who were pure black who were good men who he trusted with his life and fortune and white men of good standing in the community he would not trust with a penny. There was to his estimation only an unfortunate that they encountered the each other in history with what he called a 100 year advantage in inventions he understood this was about making money.

You said there were 250k slaves here just over a hundred and fifty years ago so where are the graves? Penny looked around, her blonde hair golden in the noonday sun. The 22-year-old, 6-foot-tall, Dior-clad Californian adjusted her short white and candy pink shirt dress. Frustrated, she exhaled a sigh and pushed up the round purple shades that had slid down her nose as she leaned over to examine the tombstone at the pauper’s gravesite.

Penelope Stockard Bedowitz was one of those kids who spoke English as a second language; she was raised by a housekeeper from Guadalajara while her investment banker Beverly Hills parents worked and traveled the globe. The Latina nannies raised her as if she were one of their own, and consequently, she didn’t learn she wasn’t Mexican until she started school at age 5. Even at 22, she spoke Spanish with a very distinct Jalisca accent it was the accent of the working class in Mexican Spanish it sounds to their ears and carries the same class implications of having a southern accent in america it was considered the to sound rural and lower class. Aeon didn’t care she adored the towering California girl. She learned Spanish from her Dominican granny and mother growing up in Mississippi to her it was just Spanish, she wasn’t into the class issue the way some of her friends from Cuba were who put a lot of stock in accents and of course believed theirs was the most pure accent outside of Spain.

Before moving to Dallas, Penny had never heard of June 19th, aka the Black 4th of July or Black Independence Day. She had met Izzy, a 13-year-old, 6-foot-tall freshman at SMU, during her junior year. What she learned from her friendships with these two Black Texas teens was striking. They knew about Juneteenth—not because they were smarter than her, but because they had grown up in a culture that celebrated it. Aeon, a freshman majoring in Marine Biology when classes started in the fall, was incredibly smart. Izzy was a math whiz. Even if she hadn’t failed, he resembled a younger version of trigonometry, and she recognized him from being on the cover of People magazine’s 30 under 30. He was the youngest recipient of the Fields Medal—a significance she had to Google, as the article claimed he was on par with Einstein and Hawking of their generation.

Her math skills were just good enough to pass her accounting classes, but she had no idea what his mathematical theories were about. Every Black person in Texas and the surrounding areas knew what Juneteenth was, and Black people across the nation celebrated the holiday. However, they rarely talked about it with white people, and as they explored the island, she began to understand why.

According to its history and past population, there should be a large cemetery here. So she asked Aeon, a Mississippi native, and Isaiah, “Where are the graves of the former slaves?” They searched the island for any evidence of old slave quarters, auction blocks, or plantations from the late 1860s, after the end of the Civil War. Isaiah had chosen to start his voyage from Galveston, where Texas slavers continued to conceal the fact that slaves had been free for years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation three years prior. The Texans continued the now illegal practice of chattel slavery for an additional year after losing the Civil War until Union troops returned to the island a year post-war. Had the U.S. military not traveled to Galveston, the Texans would still have their slaves today.

“This place blows. Why the hell would anyone choose to live here?” Penny wondered. She knew that the two of them were homeschooled by their parents, but she was unaware of the state’s real history. California textbooks only contained a few sentences mentioning Texas. If you lived outside the state, most of your information about the region came from movies.

She recalled portrayals of the Alamo, the Dallas Cowboys, and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Looking around, she thought about how many people must have been trapped, imprisoned, and beaten to force them into labor for free. Had the Indians not been essentially eradicated by disease after contact with Europeans, there would have been no trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The Europeans would have simply enslaved the indigenous population, which they did with varying degrees of success since these people were at home. They could escape and return to their tribes. The Africans could not do this in the New World. As she listened to her two friends, who had never set foot in an American public school talk about the unvarnished history of Texas and all of America, she realized that they were not taught history in this nation; they were taught white people’s fan fiction.

“These people were here for one hundred—what? Two hundred years?” Penny asked Aeon and Isaiah. “Where are all of their graves? You can’t just throw people away like that!”

“Under the city,” Isaiah replied coldly. “Most of the Black people here worked the docks, unloading cargo from ships—mostly cotton and sugarcane grown by slaves laboring on the big plantations on the mainland near the Brazos River basin. This has been a shipping center for centuries prior to the war.”

They knew little about the indigenous peoples of the isle that were here in 1528 when the first Europeans arrived and shipwrecked on the isle inhabited by the Auia tribe. “Cabeza de Vaca and his crew called this place ‘Isla de Malhado’ in November 1528.” Five years later, the first permanent European settlements arose on the isle during the Mexican War for Independence from Spain. Its initial European occupiers were pirates who aided Mexico’s independence by attacking Spanish ships.

“It’s all very Master and Commander meets Pirates of the Caribbean in real life. Remember that the overwhelming majority of Africans kidnapped, bound in iron shackles, branded like cattle, and sold into slavery in the New World were brought here by the Spanish. This was back when the Spanish and Mexicans held the Tejas territory before it was annexed into the Union after the Texas-Mexico War. It’s the whole ‘Remember the Alamo?’ fairy tale from the 1830s.”

Aeon held Izzy’s hand, feeling his pulse quicken as he explained the history to Penny while she video recorded his talk during their tour of Potter’s Field. Horrified and saddened, she absorbed the brutality of the unvarnished history leading up to Juneteenth—Black Independence Day in Texas. This history had, in the last decade, started to be shared. It had been quietly celebrated by Black people in America for over a century but was completely ignored—whitewashed, and covered up by historians meant for white consumption.

As they walked through the paupers’ graveyard, Aeon elaborated, “Even after they were free and buried in segregated freeman’s cemeteries, their graveyards were regularly desecrated whenever the powers that be needed their lands. They would build anything from a new highway to a new high-rise building. They just bulldozed the Black Americans’ tombstones and constructed new buildings on top of the old Negro cemeteries.”

“They still do this sort of thing to this day; they find tombstones from old Black freedmen’s cemeteries dumped in the woods far away from the construction sites where they were removed illegally.” Penny looked at Aeon. “I just never thought anything like that still went on in the 20th century, never mind the 21st century.”

“Did you know that the Dallas Central Expressway, constructed in the 1940s, is built over one of the city’s oldest Negro cemeteries? One of the City Place towers, as well as that golf ball driving range near University Park, were all built illegally on top of the old freedmen’s cemetery in the late 1980s. The only reason they even put up the little placard was that the Mexican construction workers reported it to the news, but they never moved the bodies.”

“It was the Mexican Catholic construction workers who contacted the local news to report what their white bosses were doing, and that stopped the construction long enough for them to ceremonially move one grave to a new location. They then finished building the driving range and ultimately put a tiny engraved brass plaque at the entrance so all of those pasty cunts would know whose graves they are stomping over in their golf cleats.”

“We are homeschooled Black people, so we grow up knowing the truth. Our parents never relied on the public schools to educate us; as a consequence, we do not have any of that American jingoism programmed into our worldview. Nor the self-hatred that comes with it. Even before the internet was a big deal, my momma and granny read Black newspapers when she was at salons in African American neighborhoods to get the real news—not the whitewashed news that omitted lynching’s and anything else that didn’t perpetuate the myth of American exceptionalism,” Aeon added.

“It’s not as if the government or anyone in a position of authority is systematically erasing Black cemeteries in the U.S. We are Black people; we understand that this sort of thing never actually stopped. The same people who are online right now, erasing the word slavery from American history or printing grade school history books that lie—pretending that Africans came to the U.S. as laborers, as if they joined a work program or enlisted in the Job Corps.”

“Every generation in American history rioted, destroyed local Black towns, burned down their businesses, and stole their land and resources, preventing the accumulation of ancestral wealth after they fled the area. The systemic harassment of Black people never stopped; it simply morphed into a different form, and they just stopped bragging about it.” Izzy shrugged as he sat down on the ground and began to sketch the gravesites at Potter’s Field in pen and ink while they talked.

Most were simply wrapped in any spare burlap sack or extra cloth for an improvised burial shroud or makeshift coffins cobbled together from scraps of lumber. Many were simply buried in the sand dunes near the beach—anywhere out of the way. Their bodies, buried in the shifting sands of the beach dunes, would eventually end up uncovered and washed out to sea, Aeon added as they traveled on foot around the city’s oldest parts.

“When the Union troops marched on Galveston with mounted cavalry, rode the ferry over to the island, and seized control of the island back from the Texas Confederate slavers a year after the end of the Civil War, there were over 250,000 (two hundred and fifty thousand, approximately a quarter of a million) slaves living on the island.”

“Just like much of the country, there has been a centuries-long campaign to erase any signs of their true abominable systematic rape, torture, starvation, and laboring to death while in chains from the island’s history. Texas history is not a noble history of revolution against Mexican oppression; it is the history of one European colony (the Mexicans, recently independent of Spain) having their territory stolen by another former European colony (the Americans). It was always about slavery; the rest is a lie perpetuated to distract you from that truth.” Aeon exhaled a sigh, her shoulders slumped. “This is just the tip of the racist iceberg between the myth taught in public schools and the reality of trans-Atlantic slave trade history.”

Penelope Stockard Bedowitz had aways prided herself on her intelligence and she imagined herself to pretty well educated and well informed. Yet, here she was with here brand new law degree finding out from her black friends about a holiday that black people had been celebrating for a hundred and fifty years and neither she nor any other white person she had ever met had heard of. They celebrated Cinco do Mayo and the Day of the Dead where in California. Penny knew they weren’t pranking her there was an official ceremony being held today on the other side of the island where the new statue was being erected.

They were at a different location far away from the official ceremony and annual celebrations. Penelope Bedowitz felt as if she had been tricked by her history teachers. They had talked about everything from Lincolns white supremacist views to the founding of Liberia they learned a completely different history than she learned. Did not like the confederate flags on cars trucks and buildings as soon as you left the major cities of Dallas, Austin, or Huston she hated the casual racism and sexism that was at the core of southern culture, an anachronistic hold over from the regions slave holding past that the locals pretend does not influence what passes for culture here in Texas. California was not perfect, but compared to these people, she preferred the company of the Crips and the Bloods to these savage crackers. What a fucking cosmic joke of intellectual squalor these people lived in; this was not a worthwhile place for thinking humans. After living here for the last four years, she knew she absolutely hated this shit-box of a flyover state.

She had only gone to school here in Texas to spite her parents by attending one of the most notorious Z-listed party schools in the nation instead of enrolling at their alma mater, where she would have been quadruple legacies. Penny smiled, thinking about how angry they were but unable to say no as long as she attended an accredited college; she would get her trust. There was no stipulation that she had to attend Harvard; only that she graduate from a reputable university with a degree in anything other than the liberal arts.

It was a Z-list school, but she was a good student and would complete her master’s degree while she and Aeon started classes at the University of San Diego this fall. Now that Aeon was on her way to university, she looked forward to leaving this shithole of a state. As soon as summer ended, she and Aeon were ditching Izzy and flying to San Diego to live on the boat with Hector and his wife, Aurielle, while they attended university. It would be great to finally return to California after four years of Texas bullshit. She looked forward to never seeing this hellhole of a backwater state with delusions of grandeur again.

Penny had already met Isaiah’s grandfather, Hector, and his wife, Aurelia, the previous summer when they sailed to Long Beach to visit. This time it would just be her and Aeon; she couldn’t wait to party in TJ. Texas was an ass-backwards, racist, sexist, redneck, hillbilly pig-fucking drag. Penny shouted at the statue in the center of old Potter’s Cemetery as they drove out of the front gate, “Fuck You, Texas!”

Aeon and Isaiah laughed, but their laughter was not born from humor; it was the laughter instead of screaming, the way the ancestors sang as they worked. It was not out of enjoyment in being slaves but to ease their own sorrows while they toiled with song. Aeon and Isaiah were not her mystical Negroes; they could only illuminate a bit of her own ignorance—nothing more. The rest was up to her to learn herself being angry was not enough when they gave her Baldwin and Wright to read when they first met she didn’t realize that what they wrote about was still relevant today.

It would be easy to pretend it didn’t matter and go on with her life. As a feminist she has seen that look in her male friends eyes as she spoke of the fight for equality and she could see the very moment they checked out. Penny knew how that always made her feel like hammered shit. It made her wonder if they were even really her friend if they couldn’t understand how important and real this was and how it affected not just her life but every woman they knew lives mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, girlfriends. Penny was too logical a thinker to not see it for what it was they did not care.

Penelope needed a drink, she thought, as she headed back to the relative sanity of Izzy’s boat docked at the marina. Maybe she could find some good professors at San Diego that taught on the subject. Aeon and Izzy were worth studying to learn the truth for. He own desire to know the truth was enough she hated being lied to and that is what her school and Hollywood had done they had lied to her fed her a carefully curated fiction in place of an objective honest history. It was as if they had put something filthy in her when they filled her mind with this jingoistic fantasy in lei of history.

Every once in a while you learn something you believed isn’t true, there is no Santa Claus, Israel is and Zionism are apartheid states engaged in genocide of the Palestinian peoples. and america lies about history. There was a difference between being the good guy and just pretending to be the good guys. It was becoming clear to her that we were only pretending. She felt dirty, as if she needed a shower after what she had learned today. Tonight, she was definitely getting white girl drunk. As they drove away, Penelope screamed as loud as she could, “FUCK TEXAS!”

Penelope stopped the car at the entrance to the pauper’s cemetery and looked at the gate through her tears. “It ain’t right, man, it just ain’t right.” Izzy stepped out of the car and knelt on the ground in front of the gate that led into the cemetery filled with unmarked graves. -they saw he had drawn the Sankofa—the symbol of the bird looking back, which Penny always thought resembled the yin and yang symbol.

Even though he had talked about sailing to Africa from the moment she first met him, only now was she beginning to comprehend why. She was a white woman; this would remain an enigma. Underneath the Sankofa symbol, he wrote two words: “Never Forget.”

For a moment they all just stood there hovering over the old graves in silence as “Like Decorations At A Nigger Cemetery.”

[Notes][“Sankofa (pronounced SAHN-koh-fah) is a word in the Twi language of Ghana meaning ‘to retrieve’ (literally ‘go back and get’; san – to return; ko – to go; fa – to fetch, to seek, and take) and also refers to the Bono Adinkra symbol represented with a stylized heart shape or by a bird with its head turned backward.”]

[Once in a Lifetime]

[And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack; And you may find yourself in another part of the world; And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile; And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife; And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’; Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down; Letting the days go by, water flowing underground; Into the blue again, after the money’s gone; Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground; And you may ask yourself, ‘How do I work this?’; And you may ask yourself, ‘Where is that large automobile?’…]

[“Indigenous inhabitants of Galveston Island called the island Auia. Though there is no certainty regarding their route and their landings, Cabeza de Vaca and his crew were shipwrecked at a place he called ‘Isla de Malhado’ in November 1528. This could have referred to Galveston Island or San Luis Island. During his charting of the Gulf Coast in 1785, the Spanish explorer José de Evia labeled the water features surrounding the island ‘Bd. de Galvestown’ and ‘Bahia de Galvestowm’ [sic]. He was working under the orders of Bernardo de Gálvez. In his early chart, he calls the western end of the island ‘Isla de San Luis’ and the eastern end ‘Pt. de Culebras.’ Evia did not label the island itself on his map of 1799. Just five years later, Alexander von Humboldt borrowed the place names Isla de San Luis, Pte. De Culebras, and Bahia de Galveston. Stephen F. Austin followed his predecessors in the use of ‘San Luis Island,’ but introduced ‘Galveston’ to refer to the village at the east end of the island. Evidence of the name Galveston Island appears on the 1833 David H. Burr.] [Create an article in the style of a Fran Liebowitz for the New Yorker Magazine reviewing, analyzing, and critiquing and close reading the excerpt from the novel by JD Cloudy:]
[“Sankofa (pronounced SAHN-koh-fah) is a word in the Twi language of Ghana meaning ‘to retrieve’ (literally ‘go back and get’; san – to return; ko – to go; fa – to fetch, to seek, and take) and also refers to the Bono Adinkra symbol represented with a stylized heart shape or by a bird with its head turned backward.”]

Notes:

[Once in a Lifetime]

[And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack; And you may find yourself in another part of the world; And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile; And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife; And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’; Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down; Letting the days go by, water flowing underground; Into the blue again, after the money’s gone; Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground; And you may ask yourself, ‘How do I work this?’; And you may ask yourself, ‘Where is that large automobile?’…]

[“Indigenous inhabitants of Galveston Island called the island Auia. Though there is no certainty regarding their route and their landings, Cabeza de Vaca and his crew were shipwrecked at a place he called ‘Isla de Malhado’ in November 1528. This could have referred to Galveston Island or San Luis Island. During his charting of the Gulf Coast in 1785, the Spanish explorer José de Evia labeled the water features surrounding the island ‘Bd. de Galvestown’ and ‘Bahia de Galvestowm’ [sic]. He was working under the orders of Bernardo de Gálvez. In his early chart, he calls the western end of the island ‘Isla de San Luis’ and the eastern end ‘Pt. de Culebras.’ Evia did not label the island itself on his map of 1799. Just five years later, Alexander von Humboldt borrowed the place names Isla de San Luis, Pte. De Culebras, and Bahia de Galveston. Stephen F. Austin followed his predecessors in the use of ‘San Luis Island,’ but introduced ‘Galveston’ to refer to the village at the east end of the island. Evidence of the name Galveston Island appears on the 1833 David H. Burr.]

About the author:

JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals: Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, Texas.