I write July’s blog after just having read an advance, uncorrected proof (a bound galley or first proof before publishing) by author Julius Lester (quoted above). I came upon this author and book for the first time while enjoying a favorite pastime: perusing estate sales. In the fifty cent bin of discarded “reads”, I found a one hundred and fifty-nine page inspiration titled “On Writing For Children & Others”. Its subject immediately piqued my curiosity as I was in the process of writing a children’s book: “Angelina Moonbeam”.
Upon first impression, it appeared that author Julius Lester and myself could not be more different. Starting with the obvious: he’s a man, I’m a woman. Lester, an African American and former Methodist minister’s son, surprisingly became a Jewish rabbi and cantor; whereas, I am a full gospel Christian minister and artist. I identify as a political Conservative. Lester was a chronicler of black America and the polarizing author of such books as: “To Be A Slave” and “Let’s Talk About Race”. His writing voice speaks most often through a microscope of injustice. I am an optimist ever expecting the rainbow after the storm. Our differences of world view and how to heal societal ills brought to mind the following question posed in Scripture.
Can two people walk together without agreeing on the direction?
Amos 3:3 New Living Translation
As I researched Lester’s list of accomplishments, I was saddened to learn that he died in January of this year: he was seventy-eight. As I got to know him through his gem of a book, I wished our lives could have intersected in the flesh. I could have learned so much from him. Yet, I assure you that meeting him through his words has made an indelible imprint on my soul.
Julius Lester was an African American whose roots were robbed from him by a slave owner. The identities of the author’s ancestors were lost for all time when their slave master chose to call his “property” by his surname. My Caucasian ancestral mix came from British Islanders who fled starvation, disease, and death in the 1840s when blight ravaged the potato crops throughout Europe. Our ancestral citizenship in America was baptized in tears.
Between Julius and me there’s an ancestral common ground: not of origin but in stories. It is the place where we walk together. As Lester writes, “Generations abide within us.” His relatives and mine - tied to the South’s rich soil for survival through the grave hardships of civil war and poverty - had been unwilling immigrants uprooted from their homelands by forces beyond their control. Sustained by sheer grit and faith, they sacrificed for their children, and their children’s children who now partake of the American Dream. And, it was the ancestral memories... their stories and folklore… handed down by our grandparents from their grandparents and beyond that captured our young heart’s imagination.
As young Julius watched fireflies flickering across humid, moonless, summer skies to the sound of the porch swing’s clanging chain, his grandmother’s dark tales from cotton fields and how “exactly” a white man - a Jew - was in his blood formed the future artist, the activist, and the award-winning author. My grandfather’s delicious stories were spell-binding too! He spoke of Abraham Lincoln as one would of a dearest friend; and his recitation of “Kubla Khan” or “The Song of Hiawatha” sent me by imagery to times and places more real than eyes could see. Papaw’s storytelling was his legacy now lived out in me. In Lester’s words, “Story creates an intimacy that is remembered in mind, body, and soul for a lifetime.”
You see, everything that was different about Julius Lester and me was irrelevant because of what was the same. Both of us, self-described artists, have lived our lives experimenting in multiple creative mediums. Yet, it was the writer in him that called to the writer in me. Our commonality - the gifts birthed in us by the storytellers in our lives - gave us a point of unity. Through our shared story, we stand on common ground.
A singular and profound sentence from the unpublished galley which I fortuitously rescued from the estate sale’s heap of discarded books serves as a perfect summation of Julius Lester’s life – as his epitaph – and as a living inspiration as I write today. “Writing has been about tending the spirit and making real the soul.”
As we celebrate our nation’s birth in myriad ways, I call to you through my poem to follow: spirit to spirit - soul to soul. Let us earnestly seek the common bond we share with all of our fellow citizens. Let us remember our shared story – our common ground - and what it truly means to be an American. It is my soul’s prayer that today our divided nation’s differences can be laid aside. Focusing on our shared freedom under God, let us embrace our forefather’s vision of unity in diversity with liberty and justice for all.
A CITIZEN’S LAMENT on the FOURTH of JULY
By Charlie Fusco
Liberty - her flame still burns...
Though flickering.
In winds of terror
I pledge allegiance -
“One nation under God”…
Though waning.
In the wake of division
I trust in “E pluribus Unum”-
Reality…
Not rhetoric.
Our fathers knew…
We speculate.
Valor and values
Replaced by vanities.
Do you not see?
Political correctness…
And undermining apathy.
Parties merging…
In malice and deceit.
The price of patriot’s blood cries from the grave:
“Where is thy crown of good…O Brotherhood?”
“Rise up! Rise Up! Flee Comfort’s crippling arms.
With passion kiss sweet Liberty’s lips of truth.
Rest not till freedom reigns from shore to shore
And Constitution’s right to life be sure.”
May our star spangled banner still yet wave
Reminding us that to love is what it means to be brave.
May God grant us - every one - the courage to
“Rise Up!”.
P.S. Listen to this inpirational song by Stan & Cindye Coates
Liberty - her flame still burns...
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