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Isaiah Jones vs. the Sea (A 21st Century Odyssey)

Juneteenth 2021: The Griot in Galveston

June 19th, 2021, Galveston, Texas/Potter’s Field

“This is what the earth taught me.”

-JDC

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

-Steve Biko

Penelope Stockard Bedowitz wasn’t certain what circle it was by number, but summer in Texas was a smoldering halo in Dante’s Inferno. She squinted her azure eyes even though she wore shades as she silently cursed the unbearably oppressive heat while the trio walked through Potters Field, the island’s second oldest cemetery. She looked at her two companions, both of whom seemed unaffected by the merciless wet heat of Texas midsummer, their cornrows and afro-puffs unruffled, their skin aglow with a light sheen of perspiration. Penny’s hair was soaked and matted to her scalp with sweat; her pale skin immediately shifted to shades of red blistering with heat bumps in the oppressive heat of the Galveston noonday sun.

It should be illegal to have to go out in this type of weather. The high humidity combined with the 97-degree heat was something no human being should ever have to work outside in the sweltering heat of the Gulf of Mexico. This was the only time Penny had ever thought the ocean was ugly. When she first saw the murky brown waters of the Gulf of Mexico that kissed the sandy beaches of the island, she knew she hated Texas just a little bit more than she did before she saw what passed for a beach in this state. Like so much about Texas, it was sort of pathetic to look at up close. A heat advisory was issued by the National Weather Service, being announced on the emergency broadcast system online as well as her weather app. It was barely noon, and already the humid Gulf Coast air was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Christian Dior was not meant to be worn in such conditions; her bubblegum pink and white jumper was soaked with perspiration by the time they drove the 15 minutes it took to get from the docks to the graveyard. The thin, sheer cotton fabric was soaking wet, completely transparent as it clung to the towering blonde Californian’s lithe, well-tanned body as she filmed everything with her iPhone’s camera.

Isaiah chose to start his solo sail to Ghana from Galveston for an incredibly appropriate, insightful, historic reason: He was retracing the route of the Atlantic Slave Trade in reverse, in space and time, on his journey. This was the last place to free their slaves, a year after the Civil War and three years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Penny drove herself and Aeon down in her new Cadillac, a crimson-colored Blackwing, to visit her neighbor and lifelong best friend, Izzy, as he prepared for his first solo sail at the end of the year. He was living on the boat in the marina for the next seven months until it was time for him to set sail on New Year’s Day.

Penny was happy to be her friend’s chauffeur; she wasn’t completely clueless. She knew that their parents were working-class folks living on what they earned teaching. They didn’t have money to buy an extra car for their teenage children. What the insurance wanted to add to their policy alone was too much. Even if they had a spare vehicle, it was beyond their budget. They weren’t going to go into their retirement or take out a loan to buy a sixteen-year-old a car. They were at the mercy of public transportation until they earned enough money after college to buy their own cars, just as they had done when they were their age.

Penelope’s investment banker parents made their money by making other people money. She only bought the ‘Hog’ (old school slang for Cadillacs and Harley-Davidsons; regional definition) to have something they could all fit in comfortably. With her being 6 feet tall and Isaiah being six feet two inches, the Cadillac she got for its size and comfort— the fact that it was one of the fastest production cars on the road was just a nice bonus. She knew that Aeon had a schoolgirl crush on her when she first met her 3 years ago when she worked as the family’s au pair, keeping an eye on their high-functioning autistic 13-year-old son Isaiah and his best friend and neighbor Aeon.

Penny and Aeon had only been dating for a few months, and now they were here in Galveston, with her as the group’s taxi and unofficial videographer, visiting Izzy on his new boat, the SS Exodus, that was still sitting in dry dock at the port of Galveston. Pen had always been easily bored and hated not having anything to do, so she suggested they come out and make a vidio about the area’s 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. The year he read Laura Dekker’s novel about her solo circumnavigation at 14. He knew the moment he heard her case being discussed on NPR—the Danish court had held her up, saying she was too young to sail alone, but she won and was able to make the trip and set the new world record for the youngest solo sailor. He wanted to beat her record immediately; he was only six years old. That was the year his sister, Emily, drowned, and 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 not just to the usual university soft touches for funding, but also put an ad 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 World Records and for insurance purposes, he would have to wait until he was 16 before setting sail. He had been preparing for this for the last nine years. Izzy was obsessed in that way that only a precocious child can become an expert in a field. He did not have a dinosaur phase, a baseball phase, or any interest in videogames; he spent his childhood singularly obsessed with all things as they related to sailing.

However, it was as he studied history that he began his love affair with old maps in the way one loves an Audubon print of a fish or a bird, as much for its technical information as its aesthetic appeal. He made the connection in his mind between the reproduction of the old hand-drawn maps of the Atlantic slave trade he saw. The maps were in a detached way to the average person; his thinking was inverted—his autistic processing was 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 centuries-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 manner of the white man over the colored man, for he had slaves who were pure Black who were good men whom he trusted with his life and fortune, and white men of good standing in the community he would not trust with a penny. To his estimation, there was only an unfortunate occurrence that they encountered each other in history, with what he called a hundred-year advantage in inventions. He understood that the Civil War was about slavery, and slavery was about making money.

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.

“You said there were 250k slaves here just over a hundred and fifty years ago, so where are the graves?”

“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 island during the Mexican War of 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 freemen’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 Catholic Mexican construction workers who contacted the local news in Dallas to report what their white bosses were doing, and that bad press 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 grew up knowing the truth. Our parents never relied on the public schools to indoctrinate us; no pledge of allegiance, no red, white, and blue flags, no white teachers rationalizing teaching propaganda as history. 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 black neighborhoods to get the real news—not the whitewashed news that omitted lynchings 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. Although if you know the history of things like Central Park and Redlining, you might reach a different conclusion. We are Black, Aeon shrugged, scrunching her nose, our people understand that this sort of thing never actually stopped. The same people who are online right now, editing the wiki, 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 we joined a work program or enlisted in the Job Corps.”

“Every generation in American history, rioting whites 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 half lotus on the ground and began to sketch the gravestones in pen and ink while they talked.

“When the Union troops marched on Galveston with mounted cavalry, rode the ferry over to seize 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 United States (now indepent of England.). 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 always prided herself on her intelligence, and she imagined herself to be pretty well educated and well-informed. Yet here she was with her 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 it. They celebrated Cinco de Mayo and the Day of the Dead in California.

She thought she was progressive because she read both of Barack Obama’s books. They were nice about it by just giving her the books they had just finished reading Camus in French that summer. Izzy, being the smartass, gave her Baldwin, telling her it was in English after seeing her still struggling with ‘L’Étranger’ a week later. They were her best friends since she moved to Dallas for school. She knew they weren’t pranking her; there was an official ceremony being held today on the other side of the island where the new Junetenth statue was being erected.

They were at a different location far away from the official ceremony and annual celebrations. Penny felt as if she had been tricked by her history teachers. They had talked about everything from Lincoln’s white supremacist views to the founding of Liberia; they learned a completely different history than she did. She did not like the Confederate flags on cars, trucks, and buildings as soon as you left the major cities of Dallas, Austin, or Houston. She hated the casual racism and sexism that was at the core of Southern culture, an anachronistic holdover from the region’s slaveholding past that the locals pretended did not influence what passed for culture here in Texas.

California was far from 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.

Penny had only chosen to go 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 Ivy League 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 graduated 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 got her BA in law. She would finish her master’s degree when she and Aeon started classes at the University of San Diego this fall. Now that Aeon was on her way to university in California, she looked forward to leaving this god awful state for good. 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 this Texas bullshit. She looked forward to never seeing this hellhole of a backwater state with delusions of grandeur again.

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 they knew it wasn’t funny; it was the joyless sound Black folks let out instead of screaming. It was the same way the ancestors sang as they worked. It was not a joyful noise created out of enjoyment in being nearly worked to death daily as slaves, but to ease their own sorrows while they toiled with song. It was something the colonists had a vested interest in not understanding to this day.

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 for 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.

She stopped the car at the entrance to the paupers’ 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; it hurt her to hear this. She wanted a gentle way to acquire this information, but there was no softness to it for them—this is how they lived, not just here, not just in America, but everywhere. It was the same story. Unless she did as they had done and learned to endure the pain of knowing, Black people would not speak honestly in her presence. This truth 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. “Like Decorations At A Nigger Cemetery.” ‘

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

[“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 either with a stylized heart shape or by a bird with its head turned backwards.”]

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.