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In the past six months, I’ve written to more public officials than I probably have in my entire life. Most of those messages aren’t worth disseminating. This one may be. It was prompted by news that the Board of Elections��of New York, my home state and the second-most liberal in the union, is complying with […]

Since we have separate ceremonies for undergraduates and MFAs, I ended up delivering it twice: Graduates and honored guests, I’m pleased to welcome you to the 2017 commencement of students in the Writing Program of the University of Pittsburgh. I promise to keep this short, even though it’s intended for two audiences, the writers and […]

The killings of the past week leave me heartsick and sick with rage. Two African-American men shot brutally, needlessly by white police: needlessly because one man was down on the ground with his arms pinned and the other was complying with a police order; brutally because what else do you call it when someone is shot several times at point blank range? Then five police officers, white and black, gunned down by a black sniper in Dallas. While some of us are grieving, others are using these crimes as instantiation of preexisting racial and political narratives. I admit to doing it too, and if I were in a mood to, I could repeat the argument that the unpunished killings of African-Americans by white police were a continuation of the massacres of black freedmen and their white allies that harrowed the Reconstruction South (and not just the South, and not just during Reconstruction).

Only recently did I learn that in Southern histories—and not just in Southern ones—the end of Reconstruction used to be called the Redemption.

I’m struck by a recent Facebook post by the artist Kenseth Armstead: “I hold my head up and HOPE & SEARCH, with LOVE, for a cure to the sickness of racist american terrorism.��

The word that stands out is “love.�� It seems such an anomalous response to the enormity of terrorism. A number of commentators have compared the violence in Dallas to that of September 11, 2001, yet when I think back to that time, I can’t remember George W. Bush saying anything about love in his response to the attacks in New York and Washington. But then Armstead is using the language of sickness and Bush was using the language of war: the Global War on Terror which we are still fighting fifteen years later.

James Baldwin also speaks of love in The Fire Next Time, which is arguably the greatest treatise on American racism. For those who haven’t read it, the book takes the form of a letter addressed to the author’s nephew, a young black man—a child, really—whom he is trying to instruct about what awaits him in a world designed variously to exclude, subjugate, and exploit people like him. The pitfalls of that world have largely been designed by white people, or people who believe themselves to be white. But “the really terrible thing,�� Baldwin warns his nephew, “Is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love.��

Baldwin was, at least at the time he wrote the book, a Christian; he’d been a preacher as a child. And Christian ethics is founded on the injunction to love your enemy. “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.�� (Matthew 5: 44-5). When I consider what this might really mean, I thank my fate that I wasn’t born a Christian. The religious tradition of my birth only required me to love my neighbor, and that’s no biggie unless my neighbor blasts Toby Keith at his lawn parties or lets his dog crap in my yard.

Loving my enemy is another story. It means not only transcending his hatred of me, but my hatred of him, because let’s face it, I do hate him. That is what it means to have an enemy. To suspend that vitalizing hatred, to will that it become love, is akin to dying. They speak of opening one’s heart, but what kind of violence is needed to pry it wide enough to accommodate the one who persecutes us? Read that verse aloud and you hear the cracking of ribs. In light of this command, it’s astonishing that anyone became a Christian, ever. They must have been distracted by the genius closer of eternal life.

I’m in no position to speak of other people’s hatreds. I can only speak of my own, which have been so excited by the horrors of the past few days. I picture my hatreds as rats racing about the cages of my chest and skull. Sometimes I swear I can hear their shrill little cries. The religion I ended up choosing, or the one where I find rest, is less concerned with good and evil than with ease and suffering, and truly, it is suffering to hate so immoderately that it feels like I have rats in my head.

I have lived in America too long and read too much of its history to think that we might renounce our hatreds because it’s the right thing to do. But might we not grow tired of being driven crazy by them?

Betsy Stone’s Pasha can’t read but she knows what she likes. I’m proud to be on her shelf. You can check out her person’s blog .

My (dubious) advice to writers, as published on the eponymous :

On the second anniversary of Lou Reed’s death,��Guernica has published my on the man, his voice, and its complicated tightrope walk between authenticity and artifice.

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A hundred and thirty years ago, Ulysses S. Grant, the general who led the Union to victory during the Civil War and went on to become the , died of throat cancer. The day before, he had completed the memoir whose writing occupied the final year of his life. He wrote it from the edge of bankruptcy, in sickness and great pain. Today Grant’s Personal Memoirs are regarded as one of the great American memoirs: I often teach them. They were also popular at the time, as Mark Twain anticipated when he persuaded Grant to break his contract with the Century Company and give him the publication rights in exchange for a 70 percent royalty. The first check he sent Grant’s widow was for $200,000, the equivalent of $1.4 million today.

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I have a proprietary interest in Grant, since I’m writing a novel centering around his bankruptcy and death. I’ve spent much of the past three years reading the memoir and his papers. In early May I spent two weeks in the Manuscript Room of the Library of Congress, where I got to see many of Grant’s letters, as well as those written about him by his contemporaries. One thing that stands out are his attempts to enforce Reconstruction, both before and after he became president. I say attempts, because he was so often hampered by forces beyond his control:

When white mobs in Memphis marched on the city’s black neighborhoods in May 1866, killing 48 people and injuring dozens, Grant called��for the ringleaders to be placed under federal arrest. The Andrew Johnson administration ignored him.

In New Orleans 2 months later, white vigilantes targeted delegates to a black suffrage convention and killed 40 before federal troops arrived to restore order. An official report on the incident by General Phil Sheridan summed it up as “no riot, [but] an absolute massacre by the police.�� When Sheridan had the city’s racist mayor and other colluding officials removed from office, President Johnson tried to fire him.

In that same year, six Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee organized something purporting to be a social club, giving it a name derived from the Greek kyklos (‘circle��). Very quickly, the metastasized into a vast terrorist network extending throughout the entire South. It burned black schools, beat teachers, and kidnapped and murdered civil rights activists of both races. Following Grant’s election, he urged Congress to enact a series of laws designed to ensure civil liberties and prosecute the Klan and allied militias. The most ambitious of these was the Ku Klux Klan bill of 1871, the first law to make private acts of violence punishable in federal court. (It also, controversially, allowed the president to use the army to enforce the measure and to suspend habeas corpus in areas that he declared to be in a state of insurrection.) In a single year, federal grand juries issued more than 3,000 indictments and convicted some 600 Klansmen. In 1874, the Supreme Court gutted it. It also ruled that the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed suffrage to black Americans, applied only to national elections but not state or local ones.

The Civil War is said to have ended on the day General Lee presented his sword to Grant at Appomattox: it did not.

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What ended was the organized rebellion of the Confederacy against the federal government. The rebellion had no other cause but slavery, and those who remained loyal to it continued to fight—not against the United States but against the freed slaves and their descendants, as well as their white allies. They did so in Memphis and Mobile, in Colfax, Louisiana, where on Easter Sunday 1873, following a bitterly contested election for governor, whites armed with rifles and light artillery took over the county courthouse and massacred more than a hundred of its black defenders. In a second coup attempt in New Orleans, 3,500 members of the White League fought a pitched battle against police and black militia commanded by General James Longstreet, who had fought for the South during the Civil War. Longstreet himself was wounded.

We can understand the current wave of judicial and extra-judicial killings of African-American citizens as a continuation of this war, sometimes by white police, sometimes by ‘lone wolves�� like Dylann Roof. That most of these killings have taken place in the former states of the Confederacy doesn’t mean much. Racism has no homeland. Police have killed black men (and black children) in ��and .

It’s likely that Grant himself was a racist, in the manner of most white people of his time. But those who would condemn him for failing to put an end to the organized killing and disenfranchisement of black people should consider how successful President Obama has been.

Some of this is almost surely bound up with the way the Civil War was allowed to end—with a parole of the defeated army of the CSA and the restoration of the rights of all, or nearly all, of its leaders. Even only had to endure two years in prison, and today his name and image can be found on public buildings, statues, and memorials throughout the former Confederacy and even in the U.S. Capitol.

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Tennessee still has a dedicated to the memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Klan.

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More pernicious is that the South—that America as a whole—was permitted to view the war as a tragic family dispute, a war of brothers, and forget why it was fought: for the right of some human beings to own other human beings and do with them what we do with livestock or machines. Today, this amnesia continues. Even among the comments on the New York Times, one comes across the bilious argument that the war was about tariffs.

I like to imagine an alternate ending to the war in which the political and economic leaders of the Confederacy, along with planters, slave-traders, and slave-catchers, were put on trial. The point of the trial would not be to punish the vanquished but to establish that a crime had occurred, that crime being the crime of slavery. The primary witnesses would be freedmen, those who had passed through the ordeal of bondage and could say what it had been like, in such detail that no one who heard them could walk away unmoved.

But this is probably my sentimental fantasy. Many Germans of the late 1940s are said to have dismissed the Nuremburg trials as victors�� justice and to have been skeptical of the testimony that unfolded there. It wasn’t until Israel kidnapped Adolf Eichmann and put him on trial, enlisting hundreds of survivors as witnesses, that the tide of opinion shifted. Possibly, it was because that testimony was broadcast live on German television, and everybody saw it.

It may also have helped that not 15 years before, Germany had been broken as a nation, with millions of its people killed and its cities bombed to ash. There are still people who are bitter about the burning of Atlanta, but they forget that Sherman ordered its citizens to leave. This is more than the allies did in Dresden.

Frankly, I don’t know what it would take to rid us of our fictions about slavery and race. There are still those comments in the Times. There are still those people who, confronted with the killing of Mike Brown and Eric Garner, will argue that one of them was guilty of stealing some cigarillos and the other guilty of selling unlicensed cigarettes. Some hearts can’t be broken by anything short of a hammer.

This isn’t about the South, but I can’t help thinking of ‘Dixie,�� and of something I wrote about the song in The Book of Calamities: forgive me for being self-referential: “There are moments in history when the suffering of the neglected and despised is seen for what it is, as if the hatch of the slave ship had been thrown open, forcing those above decks to gaze down at the faces in the hold, and meet their eyes. The trouble with such moments is that the feelings they inspire—outrage, revulsion, shame—may be too easily dispelled. The normal human impulse is to look down into the hold, then look away. Perhaps this is the secret meaning of the refrain of “Dixie��: Look away, look away.��

The Virginia Quarterly Review��has done me the honor of publishing my on (among other things) tigers, movie trailers, CGI animation, idolatry and extinction. And gracing it with the stunning illustrations of Danica Novgorodoff.

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From the William Tecumseh Sherman papers, Library of Congress Manuscript Division

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“Except for the institution of slavery and the political issues that sprang directly from it, the position of parties is exactly as it was before the war. A North, a South, the Potomac and Ohio the boundary, social prescription and disenfranchisement, the South a massive political unit, two or three dough face states in the North, impudent vindication of crime on the floor of the Senate—all this, and more, is one of those lamentable repetitions which sometimes recur in history. . . .

“Instead of one great corporation (slavery), the country is governed by many corporations. They influence every department of the State and National governments. The situation of the laboring classes is not satisfactory. In the time immediately preceding the French Revolution, Foulon, who was called une ame condamne de parlement, when asked what the French people would say to certain proposed additional exactions upon them, which did not also effect Church property and that of the nobility, answered:“Let them eat grass!�� In our time, Vanderbilt, une ame condamne of the corporate monopolies, answering a similar question, said: “The people be damned.�� In a few years Foulon heard the cry “a la lanterne!�� and died swinging from the lamp post with that death sentence ringing in his ears.

“I regard the present situation as so dangerous that, whenever I consider it, the reflection arises that from such a condition of resentful feeling the step to the gun is a very short one.��

�� C. K. Davis, letter of January 29, 1885

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first ran on the site Ryeberg in 2010, I think. That’s long enough ago for it, and many of its subjects, to have be worth reposting. I’m not sure anyone will remember who P. Diddy was. Surely he’s taken another name. And the great Johnny Cash is dead.

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