How Servitude Fed, Housed, Clothed

and Introduced Us to the Realities of Power

By Daphne Muse

Although people aspire to serve their countries, communities and callings, they don’t necessarily aspire to engage in servitude.  While servitude is not unique to African American culture and continues to be practiced in societies around the world, it is brutally and systemically situated in black life and culture, as a result of the European slave trade that began in the 15^th century.  As black men who came “Up South” to Washington, DC in 1944 and to be warmed by other suns, they housed, fed and clothed us through servitude.  As someone who learned how some of the ways in which privilege and power drove the Beltway, and turned the world, for me “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” is deeply personal.  But I entered the theater with historical fatigue and tremendous trepidation.

Opening with a sweeping arc of history that takes us from a contemporary scene inside the White House, the film segues two centuries back to the murderous brutality of slavery.  In a riveting scene played out in a plantation cotton field, we see a young boy witness the point blank murder of his father at the hands of a plantation owner who has just raped his mother.  In this moment, I’m transfixed by the remarkable performance of Mariah Carey (Hattie Pearl).  Her eyes and body language powerfully convey the pain of that history.

 That boy Cecil Gaines would go from the field to the house serving the mistress (Vanessa Redgrave) to becoming a waiter at a fancy country club and eventually Cecil Gaines a White House butler who serves seven presidents across the twentieth century in what was then arguably one of the most powerful ten powerful square miles in the world.

  As butlers at the White House and at cocktail parties for the "Emperors of K Street,” dinners and soirees in private homes, elite clubs, embassies and cultural venues along the Eastern Seaboard, my uncle George Y. Muse (Unc) and father Fletcher H. Muse, Sr., themselves two generations out of slavery, were two of the “invisible” men who heard and saw how the architects of 20^th century power and opulence bridged the Beltway and branded the Empire.  Unc served as a contract butler at the White House from the late 1950s through the first Clinton administration and worked under Eugene Allen, the head butler.  Contract butlers were brought on board to augment staff for state dinners, inaugurations and other grand scale events at the White House. Though not a biopic, the film is based around Allen’s life.  

 Their work took them both into the bowels of politics and power, as they heard, overheard and often did not want to hear decisions sealing the fate of their families, friends and the future of the country, including the planning of coups, sabotaging of civil rights legislation and the aborting of people’s personal dreams.  Often dad and Unc knew what was going to be in the Washington Post, Evening Star or New York Times even before the president.  But the job came with a protocol and requirement of discretion that mostly sealed their tongues and prevented them from speaking about what they heard, saw or were asked to do.

My dreams of what I thought my parents should have been materialized for my mother as the textile artist she is and late in life for my father.  Despite the working class jobs they held, they brought the world home to us through books and periodicals we otherwise would not have known about, access to an array of very interesting resources and at the dinner table where a bottle of Rothschild’s Champagne was paired with a pot of amazing curry or a 1957 Dom Perignon was offered up with collard greens cooked in smoked pig knuckles, accompanied by candied sweet potatoes, fried corn with okra and my dad’s infamous and silky light biscuits.  Daddy really knew how to put on the “dawg” and make it bark.

During the day my father worked as an administrative assistant at the Department of Defense and Unc worked in the print shop at the Library of Congress.  Both had toiled on the railroad and relished getting off the rails.  At night and on weekends they were transformed into butlers by a black tuxedo, hand-tied bow tie and practice of protocol. Whatever we think of these men from our remove, the Beltway Butlers were not “yessa boss, shoe shufflin’ servants”; they carried themselves with a professional poise and dignity often teaching members of the ruling class a thing or two, while schooling them on the idiosyncrasies and social proclivities of world leaders.

In the film, Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker), James Holloway (Lenny Kravitz) and Carter Wilson (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) make the demanding work of servitude look effortless, as was required by the demands of the job. And the brother man bond is so evident from the kitchen to the card table where they find rare respite from the demands of the day.  I felt as though director Lee Daniels’, the crew and actors came right up in one of those Monday night poker games in our basement, as Diana Washington’s soul poured from the Hi-fi.  They sat with dad, Unc, Mr. Lynch, and the other butlers around the table, right there in the cut of the cards, hanging on to their every word as they jive talked and brought on the same kind of poker faces that were required to navigate their invisibility as butlers. Almost to a person, these are bone marrow deep performances, where Daniels extracts every ounce of detail to the craft possible.  The wives of the butlers are also authentically portrayed across the periods reflected in the film, including the era just as they are poised on the cusp of the whirlwind of the Women’s Movement. 

In the butler’s world, some of the most hilarious moments came when they would joke about what it would be like to have a “spook” in the White House.  Along with jazz, hard bop and soul piping into the sound system, collard greens would replace asparagus, barbecue sauce Hollandaise, a cure for racism would be found and Africa would be front and center in ways it never had been.  Along with the normal hazards that come with carving meat with the precision of a surgeon, carrying heavy trays and synchronizing the removal of plates from the table, these men also had to damn up their bodies against the advances of white women whose eyes and hands wandered across borders and boundaries not theirs to claim.  According to stories passed along very late in life by some of the butlers, there were dinner parties held in socially safe houses where men who legislated against debauchery by day deeply engaged in it at night.  At intersections like this, butlers really had to render themselves invisible, excusing themselves to cleanup duty or time served for the evening. We harvested many back stories of history, from my father and uncle’s experiences.

But servitude was an economic decision borne out of necessity; options and access for jobs as teachers, doctors and politicians were limited by the strict codes and policies of race.  Some of them had sixth grade educations, while others like former White House Chief Butler Alonzo Fields (1933-1953) studied at the New England Conservatory of Music to become a concert singer.  In a fashion uncharacteristic to most, Fields kept a journal which can be found in the archives of President Harry S. Truman.  That journal served as a field research for his 1961 book My 21 Years at the White House.

Like Lucille Gaines (Oprah Winfrey), arguments ensued around how their lives were being taken over and away from them.  My mother went real deep on the matter, when dad informed her that a Mrs. Marshall, one of the women for whom he worked, asked him to Miss Daisy her to her summer home in Alabama.  I was also quite perplexed as to why Cold War Hawks and men like Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and nuclear scientist Glenn Seaborg called to book parties with dad.  My brother Vincent and I wondered if these men did not want their wives talking on the phone with black men and that’s why they instead their wives called.  Some also maintained tony pied-à-terres specifically designated for entertaining, unbeknownst to their wives, at places like the Woodner and Watergate Towers.

My cousin Lydia Muse Clemons, a retired Student Accounts Assistant at the National Labor College, AFL-CIO, carries forward a tender set of memories about her father.  “During my during my lunch break one day, I took a walk through Lafayette Park (across from White House).  My dad was there with his co-workers, waiting to report to work.  They had on their white shirts, tuxedo pants and tie (untied around their necks).”  Tuxedos were expensive and Georgetown thrift stores were the primary source for their elegant uniforms.  “These men, especially my dad, looked so handsome and stately,” notes Lydia. 

Unc served at the weddings for Lyndon B. Johnson’s daughter’s Luci Baines and Lynda Bird Johnson, and Richard Nixon’s daughter Tricia. And it must have been mind blowing in 1963, when he navigated a sea of black people who had been invited by President John F. Kennedy to celebrate the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation.  While Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. strategically declined the controversial invitation, in the mix were politicians, members of the black leadership and cultural icons including Urban League Director Whitney Young, Dean of the Black Press corps Simeon Booker, poet Langston Hughes and writer James Baldwin. There also were some powerful black women in attendance including publisher Eunice Johnson, and civil rights lawyer Constance Baker Motley who would go on to be appointed a Federal Judge by President Johnson in 1966.

One of the highlights in Unc’s life occurred while serving a luncheon in the early 90s.  Over the rims of the crystal wine glasses arose the distinct voice of a black man calling out “Unc.”  As he looked up, one of our childhood friends Clement Price was in attendance at the luncheon. Price, Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor of History and Director of the Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers gave him the ubiquitous “gimme some skin bro’” as they embraced. As more blacks began to attend state dinners and other events at the White House, cocktail parties and embassy soirees, the pride quotient lifted as they witnessed blacks sourcing and ascending to their own power.

  I remember dad coming home so excited about the fact that the Modern Jazz Quartet had played at a cocktail party; being in the moment when Joe Zawinul brought the house down at the Newport Jazz Festival where dad served a series of parties held at the summer home of heiress Oatsie Leiter; or an opening for Lyrical Abstractionist Sam Gilliam.  My father was beside himself, when he learned what white folk were paying for a black man’s art.  During one of the parties he served at Mrs. Lieter’s Georgetown home, Leontyne Price was in attendance.  Price presented my father with a copy of the program from the opening of the Met at Lincoln Center in 1966.  Printed on silk, the program notes Price’s performance as Cleopatra and the choreographic debut for Alvin Ailey.  My father gave it to me in 1966 and it now hangs in my home among the more than twelve thousand rare black books, posters, ephemera and art works I’ve collected since being given that piece.

My cousin Sadie Muse Hall, a retiree from DC Parks and Recreation, maintains a collection of memorabilia including place setting cards from state dinners and Christmas cards.  Staff and contract butlers often received Christmas cards from presidents.  Unc gave me a menu card from a luncheon commemorating First Lady and women’s rights pioneer Eleanor Roosevelt 100^th birth and a 1967 Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson’s Christmas card painted by Robert Laessig. 

Both Unc and daddy were members of the Private Butlers Association (PBA), an organization cofounded by Leon Thompson in the early 30’s.  Thompson served as President Herbert Hoover’s steward in charge of personal affairs.  The PBA set the pay scale for the contract butlers and in 1967, they were paid $10.00 an hour for the first three hours and $20.00 an hour thereafter. According to San Francisco City College professor of economics Dr. Marc Kitchel “In today’s economy that $10.00 would equate to an hourly wage of $65.81.”  While not the norm, one-hundred dollar tips were not uncommon.  While I don’t know what his salary was for his job as an administrative assistant for the Department of Defense, it required him to take on a second job to support our family.  In two scenes that simply infuriated me, Gaines takes his unwavering politeness to Chief Usher and overseer RD Warner (Jim Gleason).  Gaines goes to him with a request for an increase in wages based on the fact that the butlers, who were all black, made 40% less than any of the white staff overseeing duties related to the preparation and serving of meals. The Chief Usher’s indignant smirk of a “no” to both requests seethes with the hostility catapulted upon black men.  But according to William Hamilton who served as the storeroom manager for 55 years, the butlers refusal to serve a state dinner if they did not get a raise, resulted in President Johnson giving the raise.

 One reason dad may not have worked at the WH may well have had to do with the pay scale and the fact that white staff were paid more than blacks and there were no tips.  At other venues, along with twenty-five to one hundred dollar tips, bottles of premium spirits also were offered up to butlers like my father and uncle for they knew how to rescue a potential culinary disaster or recover a breech in protocol.  Rich white folk were not serving soul food at these parties.  On more than one occasion dad had to rescue a turtle soup, prepare a Beef Wellington or reconstruct a Lobster Newburg because the cook was drunk or simply did not show.  Many of the butlers also were master carvers who could turn a watermelon into a basket of fruit or peel the skin back on a turkey, carve the meat into thin slices and replace the skin, making it appear as though the meat wasn’t even carved.   My father also had the kind of palate where he could taste something once and replicate it.  I’ll never forget my first ever experience with curry; he made it for my eleventh birthday.  He served it with every condiment imaginable including kumquats and Major Grey Chutney.  The bliss of that dish still lingers on my palate.

My father leveraged his work quite strategically, but also raised the five of us to question the American dream and the role of black people in it.  In 1967, my father called in a favor from California Republican Congressman William Mailliard, a friend of Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren.  Within six months of making the request, my brother Lowell Vincent Muse (now a sound engineer with NPR) was appointed as a page at the Supreme Court.  Warren would go on to be appointed Chief Justice in 1969.  There Vincent was mentored by Lyndon Johnson appointee Thurgood Marshall, the first known black appointed to the court.  My brother Fletcher was fulfilling his passion for aviation by serving in the Air Force as an Electric Power Production Technician. The youngest, David Russell, was still in school.

Both my parents made it clear that racism was the pathology of white people and becoming them was not a goal.  The narrative on race was super charged in our home, because dad was as staunch an integrationist, as mom was a segregationist.  My mother still washes the colored clothes before the whites.  During the summer of 64, I was the help working for Congressman Millard.  My mother was livid; but I just wanted to earn enough money to return to college and graduate. At the end of summer, I got a job running data sorting machines and computers at the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company and was able to save enough money to finish my last two years at Fisk.

Just as Gaines was caught off guard by his son’s turn towards activism, my father was not prepared for the reality of the results of us challenging the American dream.  In 1965, I became deeply entrenched in movement politics, like Gaines son Louis (David Oyelowo).  As a student at Fisk University in Nashville, epicenter for sit-ins, I combined my scholarship with activism and attended meetings and workshops led by Diane Nash, Reverend Jim Lawson and foot soldiers from SNCC.  While others were freedom riding, I was building my courage to step in the bolder arena running mimeograph machines to reproduce flyers announcing SNCC-related events on campus and in Nashville.  Lawson and Nash also conducted riveting workshops which introduced me to the incendiary policies fueling the War on Vietnam.

While the butler is not a civil rights film, the arc of the movement comes front and center through the son who is portrayed as a freedom rider, confidant of Dr. King, black panther, candidate for congress in Tennessee and then as an anti-apartheid activist.  Here we get to see how the anti-apartheid policies of Ronald Regan whose wife Nancy (Jane Fonda) invites Cecil and Lucille to a state dinner.  At one point, Reagan says to Gaines, “You’re just like family,” one of those patronizing remarks that sends me into a tailspin and to which I always want to holla, “Does that translate into an inheritance?”  Cecil and his son reunite shortly after he bears witness to Reagan’s horrific policies against South Africa.

What I needed the film to do was make it resounding clear that these holders of power simply did not have a change of heart, when it came to the legislative shifts in racial policies.  The leadership and foot soldiers of SNCC, bold strategists including Bayard Rustin, relentless women like Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker, the Black Panthers and countless unnamed community organizers across the country inherently made that possible.  But those relationships with presidents and other policy makers in some instances had influence as well. 

 A couple of years after graduating from Fisk University in 1967, I became deeply involved with Drum and Spear Bookstore founded by SNCC legends including Ralph Featherstone, Charlie Cobb, Courtland Cox and Judy Richardson.  There my commitment to struggle deepened as I studied and digested the canon of black life and culture.  As a result of my work at Drum and Spear, I was assigned my own FBI agent, Jim South. South used to follow me from Drum and Spear to my apartment in Adams Morgan in his unmarked car.  What I came to appreciate about being escorted to and from work was that I was often carrying thousands of dollars in receipts from the store through a neighborhood rife with drug dealing, robberies and assaults.  

Things were growing increasing frightening and heady for my parents and their job security, when my brother Leonard’s name showed up in a 1969 report from the House on Un-American Activities.  My parents’ fright and fury continued to ricochet off the walls, when I was summoned in 1970 to testify before the Grand Jury.  Jail and the idea of raising my bail were pounding against their skulls like chain gang hammers. Two agents showed up to question dad about my activities. After moving to Arizona in late 1970, a white hippie mail man, not in uniform, delivered my diploma and Scrabble set to my parents’ home.  The FBI failed to return my books on Marcus Garvey and WEB Dubois, but not my letters from Shirley Graham Dubois, Mrs. Amy Jacques Garvey or Helga Rodgers, the wife of J.A. Rogers.

Like Eugene Allen, Unc and daddy stood in some of history’s most compelling and gut wrenching moments observing it being made, distorted and destroyed by the “stench” of the tides rising from the Potomac, the Pentagon and corridors of K Street. In 1980, when Grover Norquist’s hand was all up in the mix in Nicaragua and Angola, and without going into specifics, my father told me that a young upstart would come to wreak havoc on the political landscape.  While protocol and discretion were practiced, it came at a high cost:  Dickel, Jack Daniel’s and when he could get it Georgia Moonshine tortured and consumed him. But not before he got to strike his own thunder.

Whether you want to call it a twist of historical irony or long range strategy, in 1981 dad fled DC.  After Ronald Reagan was elected the stench of the Potomac increased exponentially and the growing visibility of Henry Kissinger, for whom he adamantly refused to serve parties, was overpowering. He returned to Cuthbert, Georgia where he was born and in the early 90s was elected to his own seat of power, as a commissioner for Randolph County and a board member for the Georgia Preservation Society. There he removed the mask and was able to place his unbridled tongue, with a magnitude of forthrightness, on the direct descendants of the white folks who had enslaved our family.

 
            Unc, others who served at the White House, my father, other members of the Private Butlers Association and Jack Valenti may well have thought highly of this riveting and superbly acted film that pays tribute to black men who toiled to make servitude appear effortless and casts the arc of the Civil Rights Movements, through the lens of a tumultuous father-son relationship.  For several years, Valenti, confidant of Lyndon Johnson, arch enemy of J. Edgar Hoover and former president of the Motion Picture Association of America, hosted an annual film screening and dinner party for the members of the Private Butlers Association and their wives at the Motion Picture Association of America headquarters in DC.

It is clear to me that there are people within this team who have the vision and capacity for bringing us films that present the passion, brilliance and range of dimensions with which black people live life.  I so hope that Wil Haygood’s book on Thurgood Marshall makes its way onto the screen, just as his Washington Post article on Eugene Allen did.  We also have to see more from Ava DuVernay (The Middle of Nowhere), Euzhan Palcy (A Dry White Season) and Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust).  This fall, Dave Talbert’s “Baggage Claim,” Neil Drumming’s “Big Words” and “12 Years a Slave” by Steven McQueen will hit the big screen.  I’m also eager to see what filmmakers who are now establishing themselves like Ryan Cooger, Kahlil Joseph and L. Onye Anyanwu are going to bring to the table.  Since the seventies I’ve wanted to buy a ticket to see a feature film on the incredible life of poet Langston Hughes; compelling historical and contemporary love stories (especially one set during the movement that then progresses into the generations born of those parents); and a quirky comedy about a black woman who started out as a dancer and literally takes a quantum leap into becoming a Theoretical Physicist, where she makes even bolder discoveries about the universe in which we live.

Daphne Muse is a writer, social commentator and poet.  Her commentaries have aired on NPR, appeared at Portside, in the Washington Post and Black Scholar.  She spent six years writing for Breaking Barriers, a collaborative project between Scholastic and the Office of Education at Major League Baseball.  For several decades she served on the faculty at UC Berkeley and Mills College.  During her service at Mills, a daughter of the family where she was the help was a student.  She blogs at www.daphnemuse.blogspot.com.

©Daphne Muse 2013

Homage to Helen of Washington

Homage to Helen of Washington

       

While some people camped out over night to get tickets to a Michael Jackson concert, the opening of “Star Wars” or worship at the Cathedral of Saint Tennis Shoe, I stood in the “line of history” for almost five decades to meet Senior White House Reporter Helen Thomas.  Growing up in our home in Washington, DC, my dad appointed her our kind of “royalty.” Her columns became decrees, with some of them contributing to the mission statement for my social activism. 

When my dad would come home from serving parties at private clubs, in the homes of Beltway elites and K Street cocktail parties, he would note with great excitement that there was a woman in the press corps who was “wrecking their nerves.”  Her historical acumen, political savvy and journalistic integrity were proving to be a bane to their existence.  The Beltway Boys and K Street lobbyist tried everything to discredit and dishonor her including trying “to boil her in vats of sexism.” But despite their decades-long efforts, she continued to crash the glass ceiling with the cape of tenacity draped across her shoulders.

In 1961, Thomas became the first female member of the White House Press Corp and from that point forward unbolted every door slammed in her face. She segued seamlessly from covering celebrity profiles and social issues, to foreign policy, the encroaching tentacles of K Street and the tenures of ten presidents from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama. Prior to joining the White House Press Corps, she covered the Department of Justice, FBI and Capitol Hill.  Fierce and factual, her goal was to get relevant and straight forward answers to tough questions and translate them into how the country was being run, who was running it as well as insisting upon clarification applied to the policies and laws by which it was being run. While many inside the Beltway continued to bend the bough of ethics and operate without even a molecule of a conscience, she maintained an insistence upon integrity that made the “Thank you, Mr. President” with which she closed out each press conference more than a salute to etiquette. 

In September of 2009, I moved to the front of that line in which I’d waited since 1962 and met her.  She and Congresswoman Barbara Lee came to Mills College where they engaged in a riveting conversation focused on President Obama’s promises and agenda brimming with hope and new possibilities.  Her book Listen Up, Mr. President: Everything You Always Wanted Your President to Know and Do had just been released and served as part of the focus for the conversation as well. I arrived early to the event to ensure that I would get a seat and upon arriving, sat out in the lobby across from a woman who engaged me in conversation rather quickly.  It turned out that the woman, Abby Johollo, was her travel companion and attendant.  We quickly found ourselves immersed in a conversation about her homeland of Sierra Leone and discussing her country’s comeback from the ravages of civil war.  She ended up escorting me into the reception and introducing me to Ms. Thomas, who spent the next fifteen minutes attentively talking to me, when I told her the story of how long I’d stood in the line of history waiting to meet her.  We talked about my “invisible” father hearing denigrating remarks uttered, as he served cocktails and canapés, some of her most memorable moments covering ten US presidents and Mama Ayesha’s iconic restaurant in Washington, DC; a favorite for us both. 

Awed by the presidency, but not the presidents, her fierceness, intelligence and precise knowledge of US policy made it possible to navigate through the quagmire of presidential politics like no reporter had before.  Lyndon Johnson, whose relationship with the press came with a serious tension, could not believe that in addition to heady challenges from Civil Rights leaders and the enormous opposition to the War on Vietnam, the likes of Helen Thomas was one of the contending forces in his life.  Eventually she would find herself declaring Johnson one of the best presidents ever for his work on the “War on Poverty.”  From President Johnson and “Bush the Younger” to Obama, she saw how bills and legislation were misapplied under the guise of wars we were told were essential to Democracy.  Thousands of those battered and barely breathing men and women have come home from wars, only to be “discharged” by policies that did nothing to help them keep their homes from being foreclosed upon or faced with the utter treachery of navigating the terrain of health benefits entwined in Kafkaesque bureaucracy.

After the conversation there was a book signing.  I purchased multiple copies and invited her to join me in the coming months at my brother’s home in DC, where I often held dinner parties when I went home.  In 2010, when I came I invited her to have tea, for my brother was ill and hosting a dinner party at his home was not an option.  She said, “Oh, no my dear, no tea.  You are joining me for dinner at the Press Club to listen to the State of the Union Address.”  There I sat next to this living textbook in what truly was an historically and socially surreal moment.  She deftly navigated me through the nuances of every statement the president uttered and clarified the relationship between the reality of the related policies and the rhetorical cushioning used to position and align himself with his then hope-filled message.

 After the speech, several people spoke to me and commented on how they had not seen me in such a long time.  Well, I didn’t know any of these people and was absolutely perplexed by their claims of knowing me.  Later my brother Vincent commented that they had to know me, because I was at the table with Helen Thomas. 

She insisted that I call her Helen and the protocol of my strict black southern upbringing made that difficult.  We were not allowed to call anyone a generation or more above us by their first names.  But she would not accept anything else.  So Helen it became, and friends we did as well.  On subsequent trips, we shared lunch at her apartment and drank tea infused with Meyer Lemons I brought her from my garden in Oakland.  Upon being condemned and subsequently terminated for making remarks critical of Israel, she told me that some who had bestowed awards and honors upon her, asked that she return them; I was appalled and infuriated.

          Every couple of months, I’d call and she continued to introduce me to new chapters in the “textbook.”  The last time I visited, I took her to dinner at DC’s renowned Eatonville.  She was enthralled by how creatively appointed this iconic culinary and literary tribute to 20^th century writer Zora Neale Hurston was and talked at length about the deep regard and respect she had for owner Andy Shallal. 

During the months that followed, our conversations were brief, for I could hear her struggling to muster the energy to discuss our mutually held outrages about American exceptionalism and the steady rise of the waves of Fascism licking at the shores of the Gulf, Atlantic and Pacific.  But her mind nor spine were never fractured or crushed by the boots of power attempting to rest on her neck. We also fantasized about ideas for forging peace, in Congress and the Middle East, at a time when we both felt the bottom had fallen out of hell. 

She also loved to hear about what I’d planted in my garden, a place where I will honor her during my next season of planting by naming the growing enclave of rescued orchids after her.  On each visit to her apartment, there was a fresh orchid on the table.  To have been a part of Helen’s life and witness this incredibly brilliant and fierce seasoned elder has given me the courage to face more daunting days.  She and her legacy will remain my teacher and mentor, as I continue to stand on the shoulders of her fierceness observing the landscape being racially torn asunder, fracked and droned by some of those same men who tried to boil her in those vats of sexism.

 From ancestral roots in Tripoli to her birthplace in Winchester, Kentucky to growing up in Detroit and navigating her way as an author and journalist through the congressional and presidential corridors of Washington, DC, her life reflected an unrelenting desire to see America realize the real Democracy it was once on the threshold to becoming.  I’m just so fortunate to have lived at a time when hers was a voice that unhinged so many doors that shut out women. She stood among the tall trees in a stand where she neither bowed nor bent.  Even from the back row, where she had been relegated by the Bush Administration for challenging the war mongering of the Bush-Cheney Cabal, she had such a strategic way of docking words on her tongue before launching them through the titanium walls of power.  Whether it is declared by presidential decree or not, I will honor and celebrate August 4^th as Helen Thomas Day for the rest of my days.

Daphne Muse is a writer, social commentator and poet.  You can read her blogs at www.daphnemuse.blogspot.com.

Today, I had to school a squirrel named Leroy

Today, I had to school a squirrel named Leroy

There is this squirrel that runs the fence and arbors in my orchard, in order to get up in the plum tree and take a bite out of every plum he can. Communicating with Leroy comes with challenges, because I don’t speak Squirrel and he doesn’t speak English. He just might comprehend it though. Either way, I had to have a talk with him the other day to school Leroy on the protocol of my garden, how it grows and its multiple purposes.  I started by calling out his name and probably waking everyone within a ten block radius.  I got hecka pipes.  It also helps for some of my neighbors to think I’m just a little cray, cray.  The boom in my voice sure caught his attention, as he stopped mid fence when I said squirrel.  Leroy perked up on his hind legs locked onto my eyes and listened up, before scurrying away.

I know his species is born toothless and blind, and probably there is this instinct is to play catch up once the teeth and sight arrive.  In a behavior parallel to Leroy’s, there are children who pull fruit from my trees and use it to pitch at the windows of the houses behind me.  The destruction of other people’s property seemingly has become fair game.  They also don’t recognize that this fruit growing in our yards is food that you bring to the table.  I went on to explain that this is real food, just like the kind you find at the grocery store and asked if they would pitch the food from their tables at somebody’s windows. The last time I caught the gang of three, I recommended they make lemonade and enjoy it.  I’m also going to give their family some recipes for making lemon bars, cookies and popsicles.

Like gophers and humans, squirrels can be very invasive.  While I don’t want to disrupt Leroy’s cycle and right to life, I’ve got to come up with a strategy to prevent him from destroying this fruit from which I make plum juice, nectar of the gods plum mojitos and sauce for my vanilla bean ice cream. I’m also clear that “hood rodents” have very different survival instincts.  While I don’t want the PETA people demonstrating outside my home, short of calling in UN Peace Keepers, I’m hoping to come up with a strategy for détente that allows for Leroy and me to coexist respecting the fact that we both maintain residency in the same space and love the plums.  I’m going to ask my neighbor if I can coat the top of the fence with oil to prevent Leory from scurrying across it and getting up in my tree. 

A friend told me that while in Holland attending a film festival, her husband took a side trip to purchase tulip bulbs.  When he returned home, he proudly got on his knees and planted them in the yard only to watch the squirrels dig them up before they’d rooted in the comfort of the soil.  The apple tree I planted last year now has fruit on it about to ripen.  If Leroy or his chipmunk and marmot cousins, or any other members of his clan, take to biting up my apples, then all bets may well be off the table.  While I’m unequivocally opposed to Squirrel Wars or calling on the drones, Leroy and his crew simply can’t invade the nation of my garden. They are more than welcome to cross the borders, enjoy the fruits that fall to the ground while basking in the sun and meditating beyond the sounds of urban gunfire piercing the otherwise stillness of the night air. 

Daphne Muse is a writer, social commentator, poet and urban gardener.  Her orchard and garden are filled with citrus plum and apple trees, herbs, orchids rescued from dumpsters and heritage roses.  She spent more than thirty years in higher education, serving on the faculty at UC Berkeley and Mills College and as an administrator.  Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, This Week in Palestine and in several curriculum projects including Breaking Barriers for the Commission on Major League Baseball. She blogs at www.daphnemuse.blogspot.com.

©Daphne Muse, Oakland, CA 2013

Why Daddy Mattered

Why Daddy Mattered:  A Father’s Day Ode to the Commish

My daddy mattered as more than a symbol or memory.  He was so there for me in ways that guided me through heady challenges and gave his unyielding support to make it possible for me to claim some of my life’s major victories.  By the time I was seven-years-old, I really understood the power of words, language and the ability to communicate with others.  It turned into a behavioral problem though, when in second grade, I just could not stop talking.  I talked to strangers (and still do), imaginary friends, classmates and my brothers who were younger than me and still grappling with forming words and ideas into language.  But my second grade teacher was not interested in the power of my words and as a real “Queenie Meany,” she struck holy terror in the classroom with a scowl and yard stick that ruled supreme; but obviously not supremely enough for me to shut my mouth.

As responsible teachers did at that time, she placed a call to our home requesting that my parents come up to the school and conquer my speak out demons.  Daddy came and called me out in front of the entire class for lacking the ability to obey Ms. Hughes imperious command to shut up.  Under my breath and in between my clinched teeth, I was saying all kind of defiant things, while being issued a cease and desist order to stop talking in class. Recently, my mom told me my dad was kicked out of Masons for being loquacious and challenging their practices.

 That visit to my class would be the beginning of a series of visits my dad would make over the decades to speak with my teachers about my errant behavior and achievements as well.  I would later find out that while he was growing up, he was rather challenging in his own right taking on my switch whuppin’ grandmother Johnny Clyde Muse, who would beat all up on you without batting an eye or issuing one iota of empathy.  As her favored child, he was spared many a switch waging moment and her unyielding brutality.

          One fire fly filled DC summer evening when I was all of twelve, Daddy called me to the porch front steps to deliver a very poignant biology lesson.  As I sat on our front steps listening, he was instructing me on my pending womanhood.  Three weeks later, my period showed up while I was riding my brother Fletcher’s bike. As an adult, he would give a similar set of instructions about pursuing a healthy sexual life, when in the course of a conversation we were having about my one college boyfriend; he realized that at twenty-two I was still a virgin.  

Throughout my schooling he intervened to put me on a corrective course when I strayed morally or academically.  In sixth grade, I stole a bag of potato chips, which fell from under my coat.  The store owner reported the theft to my teacher and not the cops, thus preventing me from entering a school to prison pipeline.  My teacher called the house to report the incident and the discovery of a journal he found which clearly detailed joining a girls’ gang.  Mr. Brown was adamant that becoming a juvenile delinquent was not in my stars, as he guided me towards my passion for geography and cartography, both of which also were encouraged by my father through subscriptions to National Geographic, maps he brought home for his job and a globe that I kept in the room I shared with one of my brothers.  Mr. Brown made it clear that prison was not in my future.  My father showed up to gather the details and address the matters.  He was furious with me and pointed out that I wasn’t a competent thief, nor was the gang life on my path.

In junior high he put the Algebra teacher on notice regarding her inability to teach me the subject comprehensively, because previous indicators through grades and tests indicated that I had solid math skills. He hired Mr. Guthrie, a graduate student at Howard University, to tutor me. Holding down two jobs, Dad was a clerk at the Defense Department by day and a private butler at night and on the weekends, serving parties in embassies, private clubs, museums and homes along the Eastern Seaboard.  I now know he must have had to take on extra work to afford those fees.  While my dad couldn’t make the plays I was in, my induction into the Honor Society or track meets, when called up to the school on matters of urgency, he was there. After telling him that my high school chemistry teacher “hit on me” (old school terms for sexual harassment), my father marched up to the school to meet with and inform him that he would put the Bunsen Burner up his ass, if that thought even entered his mind. I felt so protected by my dad. 

          In 1962 as I went off to Fisk University to go to college, my dad drove me from DC to Nashville.  It was the road trip of a life time, for I had him all to myself as we navigated the treacherous unlit and especially racially inconvenient roads of the South.  When I had to leave school for a year, because the scholarship promised in writing was given to someone else, he got me job as a maid with a family for whom he worked.  After my mother expressed indignation and outrage at her daughter working as a maid, he called in another chit and I got very interesting job working at the C&P Telephone Company running IBM main frame computers for the telephone company.  That job enabled me to save enough money in a year to complete my remaining two years of college.

When I graduated from college and stated I did not want to march, he was adamant that if he had to walk me across the stage himself he would.  I was incensed that our speaker was some major or general in the army and refused to keep my mouth shut about it. But I marched, on my father’s orders.  As I matured into an adult, my father stood with me during many a crisis.  When I got my first apartment he was dumbfounded that I insisted on getting a single bed.  Often slow on the social uptake, I couldn’t quite understand why I wouldn’t, until I got a boyfriend.

When I became a single parent at age twenty-six, we almost parted ways.  He proclaimed he could have dealt with this if it had happened when I was fifteen.  I doubt that, seriously.  He stood with me at my wedding and couldn’t stop laughing when I told him I was about to marry a Mississippi born white boy.  After all, I was still reeling through the headiness of the times I spent as a Black Nationalist.  He came to cherish my husband and in-laws dearly and prepared a series of sumptuous dishes, including his legendary potato salad, for Art and Margaret’s 50^th wedding anniversary in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  He said he would have come to California more often, but always thought it would fall in the ocean.  He also had a major disdain for Ronald Reagan, who was governor during some of times he and mom visited. 

During an especially heady period where my parenting skills and daughter’s life were in real turmoil, he stood with me firmly and clearly demonstrated how he truly believed in me.  Though not an affectionate man, he knew how to comfort me.  His wit, worldliness and intellect served as reassuring stepping stones out of many an emotional quagmire.

 When my parents moved from Washington, DC back to rural Georgia in 1980, dad got involved in local politics and became a county commissioner.  We bestowed the title of “The Commish” upon him, as he challenged white folk hell bent on keeping the good ol’ boys club at full membership and took on black people who refused to challenge policies dismembering their humanity.  He unnerved many a white man and upset too many colored people who just wanted to remain locked down in fear. The protocol that most often “filtered” his public tongue earlier in life, because of the work he did as a civil servant and private butler, was dismissed completely and the stark forthrightness of his manner reigned supreme, as he became a seasoned elder. 

 Witty, intellectually crisp and at times scandalous, I witnessed and understood his flaws and watched him navigate moral breeches that brought us to the brink of falling out, but never severing our ties.  I’ve spent the last fifteen years, communicating with him through photographs, dreams and memories; some brutal and others endearing. Whatever his flaws and failures may have been, he taught me to address mine head on and helped shape my character is ways for which I am eternally grateful.  He protected me in a Papa Bear kind of way and stood with me through so many of my life’s butt bruising, soul-crushing and spirit tossing lessons.  I am partly the woman I am, because “Daddy Really Mattered.”

Daphne Muse is a writer, social commentator and poet.  She spent more than thirty years in higher education, serving on the faculty at UC Berkeley and Mills College and as an administrator.  Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, This Week in Palestine and in several curriculum projects including Breaking Barriers for the Commission on Major League Baseball. She blogs at www.daphnemuse.blogspot.com.

©Daphne Muse 2013, Oakland, CA

msmusewriter@gmail.com,www.daphnemuse.blogspot.com

Preparing a Future for You to Harvest

Preparing a Future for You to Harvest

While some grandmothers choose to rock and knit, others stand boldly on the broad shoulders of ancestors who left powerful legacies and embrace them forthrightly.  Not cut from a singular cloth, millions of grandmothers, abuelas, jaddats and nanas in the 21^st century are building legacies reflective of the truths and powers in which we now stand.  And, we’re continuing the practice of turning the world on the axis of affirmation and empowerment, driven by visions of the kind of safer and saner world we really want to leave our grandchildren.   

It’s not about attempting to leave perfection.  For so many of us this has been about preparing a future for our grandchildren to harvest in a world that reflected how much we cherish Mother Earth and their future.  The sounds of laughter, smells of things freshly harvested from the garden; the time and support to grow you into and through the completion of your childhood; and just more of the tastes of the sweetness of life are what millions of us work tirelessly for you to inherit:  Not bombs and bullets whizzing through urban enclaves or  thousand-year old villages; genetically modified food depleted of the nutrients needed to grow your minds and bodies strongly; nor turning multiple generations into the streets to flail and fend for themselves.

 There are those who spend time creating halcyon memories with our grandchildren taking them on vacation, teaching them to read (while they teach us to program our phones and computers) and providing them with fantasy driven, overly corporatized, birthday parties.  There are millions of others, well into their 70s, who continue to work and scrape together funds for college tuitions, housing and support for the most horrific and unimaginable medical crisis.  Then there are those who were attacked by dogs, beaten, tear gassed and jailed while peacefully seeking to secure rights for you and your future.

 Almost to a grandmother, we each have a vision or ideas for a world we took to the streets, founded companies and advocated to local, national and global legislative bodies on behalf of your futures.  We come to this table, complete with our well seasoned and sometimes wisdom-filled minds and spirits, as activists, teachers, healers, artists, writers and presidents of countries.  Some of us even rock the mic as poets, singers and comediennes.   From war torn villages in Somalia where we rock you through the sounds of gunfire to fields in Sri Lanka where we pick tea to multi-generational family compounds in Suriname (where ancestral stories about the Djukas and Amerindians are shared) and classrooms in Kenya, the United States and Cuba from which we teach physics, literatures of the Diaspora, languages on the verge of extinction or labs where we conduct cutting-edge research, we remain mindful of the perils plaguing the world.

We continue to work earnestly to share the awe, wonders and treasures of living the human experience, for where ever we stand (or sit) in the world, billions of grandmothers carry their grandchildren purposefully in their hearts and spirits each step of the day.

Daphne Muse is a writer, social commentator and poet.  Her commentaries have aired on NPR and been published at Portside, the Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle.  You can read her commentaries at www.daphnemuse.blogspot.com or email her at msmusewriter@gmail.com.

It’s way past time to cancel the 24/7 Tits, Abs, Ass and Dick Show

I love the human body, what it can do and how it represents in so many physical variations. I’m also enamored with its diversity, from black locks and curls that coil, spring and bounce, to people with midnight skin and blue eyes, and raging redheads with aquiline noses.  Museums, art galleries and iconography from across centuries of cultures are filled with representations and celebrations of the human form.  But from women with boobs (nipples erect) spilling out of their dresses, to butt crack glaring back at you in restaurants and “projectile overfunction” in public arenas, I’m just outraged by the inescapable “24/7 Tits, Abs, Ass and Dick Show (TAADS).” 

The beauty and eroticism of our bodies continue to be defiled and dehumanized through deeply disturbing pornography, subversive advertising, raw hoochie momma on steroids and bling-a-rama, hyper-sexploitation.  As the ubiquitous sex tapes, “who hit it first” songs rampage up the charts, no holds barred discussions in the workplace and graphic Facebook boastings of what should be private moments soar, it’s all too blatantly raw.  Oh, and please spare us from that senior citizen booty call sex tape about to drop courtesy of Viagra.  May it incinerate from the volition of some mysterious, unknown force.

The art of seduction and romance also have become sensationalized by reality TV.  If your body isn’t comparable to the tits, abs, ass and dicks flaunted across film and social media, then the message is you don’t qualify and won’t get what they got.  There are indeed those who have had exemplary erotic encounters with sexual intimacy and pleasure that have nothing to do with any of this and everything to do with sharing breath-taking moments, the divinity of love-making, and creating a life-line of passion-driven pleasure me, treasure me memories.

Treasured and pleasured, I love the joys of mutually appreciated and consensual sex, engaging in interestingly flirtatious moments while looking back at a man with a serious case of the “fines,” or seeing a woman who exudes sensuality navigating the whirlwind of it without being coarse, crass or base.  The allure of discretion can be so magical, sensual and seductive.  But the word discretion has all but disappeared from our lexicon.  With the imagination constantly being desensitized and sexuality corporatized, it seems ever more challenging for people to experience the awe and magic of sexual pleasure and intimacy.  

But one really never knows when someone deemed by others as a physically “ordinary” person carries the experience of a sexually extraordinary being, or when a partner likes exploring a fleshy body over bone on bone sex. Throughout the twenty-seven year friendship and marriage I had with a wonderful man who was a high functioning quadriplegic, I got to wear the passion and intimacy of our relationship on a face that still smiles with the sensuality of the awe and wonder we shared.  The most intimate details were shared in the pages of my journals or sometimes giggled with a trusted friend who also honored and practiced discretion.

There is tremendous irony in the fact that sex education programs across the country have been eviscerated, relegating them to the evangelical cauldrons of oblivion.  Despite sexual crassness continuing to be advertised, blasted and blinged everywhere, it really is possible to live sexually exciting lives without succumbing to the 24/7 tits, dicks and abs, ass shows booming and blazing like rockets into the stratosphere or crotches splayed across screens into vaginal spills. Dialing back the 24/7 TDAA shows and magically navigating the erotic paths to pleasure and intimacy can bring surprising revelations about what’s housed within the fountain that pours into sensual valleys from within your own soul.

Daphne Muse is a writer, poet and social commentator.  You can read her blogs at www.daphnemuse.blogspot.com.

©Daphne Muse, Oakland, California 2013

Preparing a Future for You to Harvest

Preparing a Future for You to Harvest

While some grandmothers choose to rock and knit, others stand boldly on the broad shoulders of ancestors who left powerful legacies and embrace them forthrightly.  Not cut from a singular cloth, millions of grandmothers, abuelas, jaddat and nanas in the 21^st century are building legacies reflective of the truths and powers in which we now stand.  And, we’re continuing the practice of turning the world on the axis of affirmation and empowerment, driven by visions of the kind of a safer and saner world we really want to leave our grandchildren.   

It’s not about attempting to leave perfection.  For so many of us this has been about preparing a future for our grandchildren to harvest in a world that reflected how much we cherish Mother Earth and their future.  The sounds of laughter, smells of things freshly harvested from the garden; the time and support to grow you into and through the completion of your childhood; and just more of the tastes of the sweetness of life are what millions of us work tirelessly for you to inherit:  Not bombs and bullets whizzing through urban enclaves or  thousand-year old villages; genetically modified food depleted of the nutrients needed to grow your minds and bodies strongly; nor turning multiple generations into the streets to flail and fend for themselves.

 There are those who spend time creating halcyon memories with our grandchildren taking them on vacation, teaching them to read (while they teach us to program our phones and computers) and providing them with fantasy driven, overly corporatized, birthday parties.  There are millions of others, well into their 70s, who continue to work and scrape together funds for college tuitions, housing and support for the most horrific and unimaginable medical crisis.  Then there are those who were attacked by dogs, beaten, tear gassed and jailed while peacefully seeking to secure rights for you and your future.

 Almost to a grandmother, we each have a vision or ideas for a world we took to the streets, founded companies and advocated to local, national and global legislative bodies on behalf of your futures.  We come to this table, complete with our well seasoned and sometimes wisdom-filled minds and spirits, as activists, teachers, healers, artists, writers and presidents of countries.  Some of us even rock the mic as poets, singers and comediennes.   From war torn villages in Somalia where we rock you through the sounds of gunfire to fields in Sri Lanka where we pick tea to multi-generational family compounds in Suriname (where ancestral stories about the Djukas and Amerindians are shared) and classrooms in Kenya, the United States and Cuba from which we teach physics, literatures of the Diaspora, languages on the verge of extinction or labs where we conduct cutting-edge research, we remain mindful of the perils plaguing the world.

We continue to work earnestly to share the awe, wonders and treasures of living the human experience, for where ever we stand (or sit) in the world, billions of grandmothers carry their grandchildren purposefully in their hearts and spirits each step of the day.

Daphne Muse is a writer, social commentator and poet.  Her commentaries have aired on NPR and been published at Portside, the Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle.  You can read her commentaries at www.daphnemuse.blogspot.com or email her at msmusewriter@gmail.com.