Gumption (8 page)

Human beings are not simple. We are, in fact, quite complicated. In recent American history, we have engaged in such contradictions as owning slaves, while declaring all people to have equal rights, while heading to church to pray for peace and tranquility, while dropping bombs on Middle Eastern nations to secure the oil we need to fuel our vehicles in order to drive to church. We’re a mess, and we have to count ourselves as part of the whole, because we’re all complicit. So when I think about that time that we established our nation and economy while indulging in the unthinkable brutality of slavery, and then we also actively exterminated the Native American tribes across the continent because they stood in the way of our real estate plans, and then we
freed
the slaves and didn’t manage to wipe out all the indigenous people, in fact we made them and every other race besides white people our “equals” as citizens, at least on paper, so they could come over to our houses and look us in the eye if they so choose, I can then understand why we’re scared. It gives me fear as well to imagine the recompense that might be visited upon us, should the suppressed rage of all the victims of the Manifest Destiny be brought to bear upon our doorsteps. It makes us cry with secret terror that we want our mommies or our guns, or both.

But then here’s this other point of view: When unspeakable violence is enacted upon innocents, say, in a school or movie theater, and the survivors and the families of the victims, in the throes of pain and anguish, want to ask, “Why did this happen?,” “How did this happen?,” and “What can we do to prevent this from happening again?,” and one of the areas upon which they (still we) focus their scrutiny is that of the highly efficient weapons of warfare that are casually
available to us citizens of the United States, then we frightened gun lovers have the chance to be human and say, “Okay, this is a horrible tragedy. Let’s open up a conversation here.” Instead, I’m surmising, out of fear, we throw up our defenses and behave in a very confrontational way toward such a conversation, citing the Second Amendment as the ultimate protection of our rights, no matter how ridiculously murderous the firearm, which, unfortunately, makes us look like total dicks.

Clearly, if we could magically remove all the guns from the planet, we as a species would still occasionally want to kill one another. We’re animalistic that way, because, despite having Netflix, we’re animals. Taking away all the guns is not going to stop murder, just like making us remove our shoes at the airport is not going to stop terrorist acts. We may be animals, but we’re exceedingly clever animals, so we’ll find a way to do as we please, despite the law. We always have. If that’s the case, then should we not perhaps try instead to examine the way we treat one another, so the chances that any of us want to shoot up a school are lessened?

Finally, haven’t we all learned from action movies and Westerns that the ultimate hero is the one who needs no gun? True grit, real bravery, is exemplified by an openhanded confrontation, rendering the handshake or the embrace the ultimate method of laying waste to evil. If our foreign policy sees us engaging in nefarious and shameful and often just openly bullying practices to strong-arm other nations into giving us what we want, should we then be surprised when radical extremist factions of those nations fly planes into our buildings or commit other acts of retaliatory violence? And is the most effective
method by which we might bring about the cessation of their hatred of us really to go and “kill them right back,” an eye for an eye, Hatfield-and-McCoy style? If the bravest protagonist is the one who lays down his or her weapon, then doesn’t our desperate clinging to our guns make us cowards?

I fear that if James Madison were to show up today, he would be pretty depressed about what pedantic babies we’ve become in our handling of his excellent document. The last time we made any sort of amendment whatsoever was 1992, and it was just about what the members of Congress would be paid. We do an awful lot of griping about the flaws in our system, and yet the means by which we can change it are already in our possession. All we have to do is pay attention.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS

H
ey, it’s a black guy!

Relatively speaking, by which I mean in the grand scheme of recorded history, the historical period containing American slavery occurred about fifteen minutes ago. When I was an actual book-larnin’ student in my teens and twenties, these early years of America’s development seemed like they occurred eons ago, perhaps shortly after the dinosaurs made their undignified exit. As I have achieved the more cantankerous age of forty-four, however, and I think back to purchasing my first Kurt Vonnegut book or my first Tom Robbins, nay, my first Duran Duran record thirty years ago, and then I consider the fact that Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 occurred a mere factor of five times since I was first besotted with the song “Hungry Like the Wolf,” I realize just how recently we “modern” Americans actually engaged in such depravity.

When I began to compile the list of possible subjects for my book, the flaws in my own proclivities quickly emerged. For example, my editor, Jill, told me that, although Chicago Cubs legendary second
baseman Ryne Sandberg had indeed turned in a most impressive career both at the plate (277 career home runs) and in the infield (nine Gold Gloves; .989 career fielding percentage), his contribution was perhaps too specialized for the “general” audience (by which she means dullards? soccer fans?). Discussing Ryno, she asserted, would be literally too “inside baseball.”

However, it almost immediately occurred to me that I would want to talk about some assorted social issues like racism and slavery, gender inequality, homophobia, red-meat rights, and so forth, and so I argued that I could find all these peccadilloes fully represented in a comprehensive history of the Chicago Cubs Major League Baseball team, widely regarded as the greatest team in the history of the sport (after next year’s season—just you wait and see). What is probably quite clear to you by now is that Jill did not approve the “Cubbies’ Gumption” idea. I would need to extend my gaze beyond the friendly confines of Wrigley Field.

Despite the overall laudatory tone of the first three chapters, I have also hinted at some of the more shameful episodes surrounding our nation’s beginnings, and so I thought it would only be fair, yea, and balanced, to examine those darker spots with closer scrutiny. Yes, our Founding Fathers did some amazing head-scratching, hollering, and ultimately heroic document scribbling, but they also engaged fulsomely in, for example, the horrific practice known as slavery. From that purview, then, it is not surprising that I should next be enthralled with Frederick Douglass. So:

In 2005, when Ryne Sandberg was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, he spoke stirringly about paying the
appropriate
respect
to the game of baseball, whether one is belting a home run or laying down a sacrifice bunt. In a final selfless turn, he also campaigned for a similar induction into Cooperstown on behalf of his former Cub teammate the great Andre Dawson, aka “the Hawk.” It occurs to me, Jill, that I can metaphorically include Ryne Sandberg’s virtues in my book, if I (a white guy) similarly get behind Frederick Douglass (a black guy) for induction into my own personal “Gumption Hall of Fame.” If we are agreed, then, upon this apt comparison, let us proceed. Go, Cubs, Go!

I had known the basic outline of Douglass’s story, namely, that he was a famous orator and abolitionist who had begun his life as a slave. As is the case for so many topics in the distant safety of my midwestern history class, however, I never really thought about what that journey entailed, from a simply human point of view. I thought, “Okay, he was a slave, which was a total bummer; then he escaped to freedom and it turned out he was smart—smart as shit, in fact—so he did some orator stuff, so then he was not as bummed out.” Upon revisiting his story, however, I could not help but gape at the details my soft, privileged ass had not previously digested.

Frederick Douglass was born into slavery on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, never knew his father (who was rumored to have been his master), and was seldom allowed to see his mother, since “it was common custom to part mothers from their children at a very small age.” He guesses he was born in 1818 but was never certain of his age because not only were slaves disallowed to learn to read and write, they were also not taught things like the months or years of the calendar.

After his mother died, he was sent to Baltimore to serve at the house of one Hugh Auld. Auld’s wife, Sophia, a kind woman, began teaching young Frederick the alphabet, despite the Maryland state law that forbade teaching a slave to read. When her husband found out about these lessons, he was outraged, and she was strongly admonished (not with a whip or anything, but probably some pretty stern talking), because Hugh held, as did the status quo, that literacy would ruin a slave, as “he would become dissatisfied with his condition and desire freedom.” This statement sadly infers that the slaves were otherwise “satisfied with their conditions,” which means that these white folks must have been either deeply stupid or viciously evil, or, quite possibly, both.

Frederick Douglass possessed a prodigious intellect, which, like an ineludible superpower, began to assert itself once he began to apprehend the world around him. Coming into his strength as a young man, Douglass became aware that the world held opportunities for forbidden learning in unlikely places. Consider this example of gumption: Douglass was sent by Auld to work at Durgin and Bailey’s shipyard down at the wharf. As he worked alongside the builders of wooden ships, he began to notice that once they had completed crafting a piece of the ship—a plank, frame, or knee—they would write two letters upon the piece to signify where on the ship the piece fit. If it was for the starboard side, forward, they would mark the piece with an “S.F.,” and if the larboard side, rear, or “aft,” then upon the plank would be written “L.A.,” and so on. By means of assiduous studying, Frederick Douglass was able to surreptitiously master his first four letters.

Since he was unable to continue his education at home, Douglass began to secret away small hunks of bread to exchange for quick lessons with neighborhood white boys of his own age. He collected every stray newspaper and brochure, and his knowledge grew incrementally, one letter and then one word at a time. On the next occasion in which your put-upon kid bitches about a spelling test, please relay this anecdote to him or her.

The Aulds had a son named Thomas who was learning to read and write in school, right out in the open (I guess he must have been a white kid), and this Thomas had practiced his writing skills in several copybooks, which were kept in the house. On Mondays, when he was left alone to mind the house, risking a vicious beating, if not worse, Douglass took to copying Master Thomas’s sentences over again in the spaces between the lines, tediously self-training his hand and brain, until he finally succeeded in learning how to write. Okay, so maybe the Founding Fathers were fed up with some overzealous taxation on the part of England. Douglass could literally have been
killed
for merely trying to learn to write his own name. Talk about gumption. This guy makes George Washington look like Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Douglass was then hired out to a shipbuilder named William Gardner on Fell’s Point, where he was trained to caulk the seams of a boat’s hull, a step in boat construction imperative to ensuring watertightness. Caulking entails the use of a dull, flat, wide, chisel-shaped iron and a specialized mallet to drive gauzy cotton or oakum into the seams between the planks of the hull. Once the seams have been packed tight with the ribbons of organic fibers, they are then covered
with pitch. Douglass loved the work, when he wasn’t being run ragged all over the wharf and back, running errands for the rest of the crew, comprised of freemen both black and white.

Although he was earning wages, the highest wages paid to a caulker, in fact, he was still required to turn over every penny to Hugh Auld every Saturday night, which rankled all the more intensely, since he felt so tantalizingly near to freedom, being paid for his honest labor.

For so many people the ocean and particularly sailing boats represent a sense of wide-open freedom, but for Douglass, working on the wharves every day, they had the opposite effect. He later wrote this moving recollection of his ill feelings toward the ships whilst gazing upon Chesapeake Bay, “whose broad bosom was ever white with sails from every quarter of the habitable globe”: “You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! . . . O that I were free!”

Okay, first of all, this language is from the guy who learned to write from ship parts, specifically beginning with
A
,
F
,
L
, and
S.
Extraordinary but true. And this is just an excerpt of a paragraph that goes on ten times longer, a heartrending and elegiac bemoaning of his unthinkable condition. Second of all, when did we stop using “O!” as an exclamation? It’s so effective poetically as an evocation of longing or lament. O I would like a delicious cheeseburger. O I wish the people at the airport would not crowd into line like lemmings. O I wish I were half as smart as Frederick Douglass!

Beyond his secret herculean efforts to learn his letters, Douglass was
also required at times to call upon muscle of a wholly less figurative sort. As he was assigned tasks requiring more responsibility about the Aulds’ property, he also found himself more vulnerable to the overseer charged with establishing the boundaries of those responsibilities. Douglass found himself offering defiance in the face of his oppressors, almost involuntarily at first, earning himself several vicious beatings, until he finally fought his overseer, a Mr. Covey, to a brutal defeat.

My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact. I did not hesitate to let it be known of me that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.

So, you know, as a kid learning about slavery, I had been able to grasp the bullet points of horror, from the brutal and murderous capture of the African natives to the shackled, forced labor and incredibly inhuman conditions of life working on a plantation. In my reading, I picked up further rapacious details over the years from the writings of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker and
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and
The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn
, and more, and of course I had seen
Roots
and
Gone with the Wind
and
The Color Purple
and
12 Years a Slave
and
Glory
and their ilk. Consuming these narratives obviously made me no expert, but I had viewed and read of many harrowing and viscerally depressing accounts of life in the days of slavery.

What I had not yet encountered, until I read Frederick Douglass (who penned three autobiographies, two of them before the Civil
War!), were the bald circumstances, so succinctly rendered, that a brain and spirit such as those possessed by Douglass were so effectively the worst nightmare of “the White Devil.” So typically of the American media, Abraham Lincoln gets all the press when it comes to emancipation buzz. It brings to mind the way we as a (white) people were finally allowed to comprehend the plight of the Lakota Indian tribe only when beautiful Caucasians Kevin Costner and Mary McDonnell went and lived with them in
Dances with Wolves.

In 1838, having navigated a daring escape from Baltimore by stealing aboard a freight train with the uniform and identification of a free black seaman, traveling by train and then steamboat to Philadelphia and finally New York City, all in fewer than twenty-four hours, Douglass finally succeeded in claiming his rightful place in the Land of the Free. He later wrote of his indescribable feelings upon the occasion, at the tender age of twenty: “Anguish and grief, like darkness and rain, may be depicted; but gladness and joy, like the rainbow, defy the skill of pen or pencil.”

Before this book project I did not realize what a singular superman the abolitionist movement had found in Frederick Douglass. Right they were, the proslavery fuck-nuts, to fear that just such a firebrand as he would be powerfully instrumental in helping to bring about the end of slavery. I find it noteworthy that, despite his superior wits, it was his hard work and elbow grease that ultimately earned him the opportunity to utilize his genius for language. Once he had escaped to the free Northern states and settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Douglass was still unable to find work as a ship caulker because of prejudice. He was unfazed, exhibiting no apparent bottom to his well of gumption.

Finding my trade of no immediate benefit, I threw off my caulking habiliments, and prepared myself to do any kind of work I could get to do. Mr. Johnson kindly let me have his wood-horse and saw, and I very soon found myself a plenty of work. There was no work too hard—none too dirty. I was ready to saw wood, shovel coal, carry wood, sweep the chimney or roll oil casks,—all of which I did for nearly three years in New Bedford, before I became known to the anti-slavery world.