"Galveston's Response to the Hurricane of 1900," Mary G. Ramos

"After the Storm

When the wind and rain stopped and the water receded, the survivors emerged from their shelters to a horrific sight. Bodies lay everywhere. Many victims were buried in the huge piles of rubble that covered the city; they were discovered only as the clean-up progressed. Structures in two-thirds of the city were totally destroyed. In the remaining one-third, most buildings were badly damaged.

The Galveston News published a stark single sheet on Sunday morning, headed, "Galveston News. Sunday Sept. 9, 1900. Following is list of dead as accurately as News men have been able to make it. Those who have lost relatives should report same at News office. This list will be corrected and added to as returns come in." There followed a two-column list of names.

There will probably never be a full accounting of all the people who perished in the 1900 storm. In the semitropical climate, the most urgent task was disposing of the remains of the victims for health reasons. Because of the powerful stench of decaying bodies, searchers wore handkerchiefs saturated with camphor over their noses, and many drank whiskey to dull the horror. When not enough volunteers could be found for this grisly task, men were rounded up at gunpoint or bayonet point to do it.

At first, the remains were transported on barges into the Gulf, weighted with heavy rocks, and dumped overboard. When some of the bodies began to float ashore several days later, funeral pyres were used to cremate the victims.

About 70 victims a day were found during the first month after the storm. The funeral fires burned into November. Not until Feb. 10, 1901, was the last body found. A final list of 4,263 dead was published in the Galveston News in early October, but many bodies were never identified. The best estimates give the number of dead as about 6,000 people in the city, while another 4,000-6,000 died elsewhere on the island and on the nearby mainland.

Besides the human toll, the value of damaged property was estimated at $30 million, including 3,600 homes destroyed. The wagon bridge had washed away, leaving railroads the only transportation to the mainland..., Mary G. Ramos, Editor Emerita, Texas Almanac 1998–1999.

"Galveston"s Horrific Hurricane of 1900"

"Every heart's a hurricane," Erin Hanson

Origami Crane

Erin Hanson

"Breathe"

India Arie

Haiku Death Match: 2017 National Poetry Slam, Denver Colorado

Hurricane Harvey-

“Torrential rain, high wind” drive

Waves of fear and flight

"France Confronts Slavery, A Demon of its Past, " James McAuley

Paris’s only significant slavery memorial — a bronze statue of broken chains —
sits in front of an ornate building once owned by the Bank of France.
(James McAuley/The Washington Post)

“'...I wish to give to France an institution it still lacks, a foundation for the memory of the slave trade, slavery and its abolition,' (he) President François Hollande told reporters.  The government’s announcement comes after years of frustration in France’s black community — one of the largest in Europe — over what they consider the effacement of a traumatic history...."

"...For Louis-Georges Tin, the president of the Representative Council of France’s Black Associations (CRAN), which led the campaign for the new foundation, the long public failure to grapple with slavery and its legacy sends a clear message.  'It clearly means that black lives do not matter,' he said in an interview...."

"...In the 18th and 19th centuries, France was among the major European slave-trading nations, capturing and selling an estimated 1.4 million people before leaders outlawed slavery in 1848.  The country’s coffers grew rich from colonial conquests in Africa, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, where slave labor generated the commodities that French merchants then sold in Europe.

When metropolitan France finally outlawed slavery — a generation before the United States — liberation brought freedom only in theory for many blacks in French territories overseas. 'Slavery was abolished, and the old slaves became citizens,' said the historian Frédéric Regent, a renowned expert on the French slave trade. 'They even elected deputies. But the plantation economy continued with the same masters, who then became ‘employers.’ 

'What was different between that and slavery?' Tin asked. 'Nothing.'

This form of economic subjugation overseas persisted well into the 1960s, when France, crippled by two world wars, lost its former empire. Many argue that the injustice persists today in the form of socioeconomic disparity between young whites and blacks, increasingly confined to peripheral suburbs and low-paying jobs," "France Confronts Slavery..., " James McAuley, Washington Post, May 28, 2016 .

ReunionWeb

"George," Brian Francis and Christopher Michael

Write About Now



  “'I didn’t, didn’t do it,' Wilford Hunter said Stinney told him. 
He said, ‘Why would they kill me for something I didn’t do?’ ”

"...After a two-hour trial and a 10-minute jury deliberation, Stinney was convicted of murder on April 24 and sentenced to die by electrocution, according to a book by Mark R. Jones. At the time, 14 was the age of criminal responsibility. His lawyer, a local political figure, chose not to appeal.

Stinney’s initial trial, the evidence – or lack of it – and the speed with which he was convicted seemed to illustrate how a young black boy was railroaded by an all-white justice system. ...,""...10 Years to Convict...70 Years to Exonerate...," Lindsey Bever, Democracy Dies in Darkness: The Washington Post, December 18, 2014.

"...A few miles off I-95, past acres of brown-and-white fields where blackbirds circle overhead, this small town in the heart of Deep South cotton country isn't known for much. It has a post office and a few churches, some abandoned houses and some nicer ones, ramshackle trailers and cotton fields. After church on a recent Sunday there, George Frierson was scuffing a shiny black dress shoe across some gravel at a railroad crossing. Back when he was a kid the rail line split this tiny, rural town along racial lines. But for blacks like him growing up in Alcolu, the train tracks signified something even more sinister than segregation.

'Where they actually found the girls' bodies, they say it was just along the tracks,' he said...," "...A Modern Understanding...," Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, Corey Hutchins, December 11, 2013.

Free

To live

To love

To count the stars above

Full moon rising

In the "Mood Indigo"

Of shimmering sky.

To dream

To hope

To curse the world below--

Static and stagnating,

 Imperceptible revolution

A comforting lullaby.

In war

In peace

To be 

You and me

Like meteors blazing

Within and without:

Boundless.

Phyliss Hyman
Terri Klausner
Sophisticated Ladies

"I Woke Up," Jameson Fitzpatrick

and it was political.

I made coffee and the coffee was political.

I took a shower and the water was.

I walked down the street in short shorts and a Bob Mizer tank top and they were political, the walking and the shorts and the beefcake silkscreen of the man posing in a G-string. 

I forgot my sunglasses and later, on the train, that was political, when I studied every handsome man in the car. Who I thought was handsome was political.

I went to work at the university and everything was
very obviously political, the department and the institution.

All the cigarettes I smoked between classes were political,where I threw them when I was through.

I was blond and it was political. So was the difference between “blond” and “blonde.”

I had long hair and it was political. I shaved my head and it was.

That I didn’t know how to grieve when another person was killed in America was political, and it was political when America killed another person, who they were and what color and gender and who I am in relation.

I couldn’t think about it for too long without feeling a helplessness like childhood. I was a child and it was political, being a boy who was bad at it. I couldn’t catch and so the ball became political.

My mother read to me almost every night and the conditions that enabled her to do so were political.

That my father’s money was new was political, that it was proving something.

Someone called me faggot and it was political.

I called myself a faggot and it was political.

How difficult my life felt relative to how difficult it was
was political. I thought I could become a writer
and it was political that I could imagine it.

I thought I was not a political poet and still my imagination was political.

It had been, this whole time I was asleep.

Jameson Fitzpatrick

"Both Sides Prayed to the Same God," Bill Federer

Death of Stonewall Jackson

"A few moments before he died, as he was losing consciousness, he said: 'Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.'

Most Civil War historians hold the opinion that had General Stonewall Jackson been alive and commanded two months later at the Battle of Gettysburg, the South may have won the battle, and possibly the war.

Jackson’s death was difficult to reconcile, as he was exemplary in faith and virtue. Loyal to Virginia, he was against slavery and freed the slaves he inherited from his wife’s estate.

Beginning in 1855, Jackson participated in civil disobedience every Sunday by teaching a Colored Sunday School class at the Lexington Presbyterian Church. Though a Virginia law forbade teaching slaves to read, Jackson taught both slaves and free blacks, adults and children, to read the Bible.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt stated, Sept. 17, 1937: 'I came into the world 17 years after the close of the war between the States. … Today … there are still many among us who can remember it. … It serves us little to discuss again the rights and the wrongs of the long 4-years’ war. … We can but wish that the war had never been. We can and we do revere the memory of the brave men who fought on both sides. … But we know today that it was best … for the generations of Americans who have come after them, that the conflict did not end in a division of our land into two nations. I like to think that it was the will of God that we remain one people.'

At the Confederate Memorial in Arlington Cemetery, President Coolidge said, May 25, 1924: 'It was Lincoln who pointed out that both sides prayed to the same God. When that is the case, it is only a matter of time when each will seek a common end. We can now see clearly what that end is. It is the maintenance of our American ideals, beneath a common flag, under the blessings of Almighty God,'"  "Civil War: 'Both sides prayed to the same God,'"Bill Federer, American Minute, 03/29/2015. 

   Johnny Cash

"Battle Hymn of the Republic"

"Familiale," Jacques Prévert

Jacques Prévert Bio 

"The Ballad of Booth," Steven Sondheim's Assassins

"...Booth was not a madman, according to Alford. In fact, he was politically motivated to assassinate Lincoln.

'John Wilkes Booth was one of those people who thought the best country in the history of the world was the United States as it existed before the Civil War,' Alford says. 'And then when Lincoln came along, he was changing that in fundamental ways.'

Those ideological differences include increasing the power of the federal government and emancipating the slaves, both things Booth was vehemently against. He was angered that the government instituted an income tax and the military draft, and that the government occasionally suspended habeas corpus, a legal protection against unlawful imprisonment. All these things, Alford says, agitated Booth,"  "Who Was John Wilkes Booth...," NPR.

Victor Garber- John Wilkes Booth

Patrick Cassidy-Balladeer

Sondheim Celebration

Carnegie Hall, 1992,

Assassins

Thomas Jefferson's "Deplorable Entanglement"

Thomas Jefferson: Liberty & Slavery

Thomas Jefferson helped to create a new nation based on individual freedom and self-government.  His words in the Declaration of Independence expressed the aspirations of the new nation. But the Declaration did not extend “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” to African Americans, indentured servants, or women. Twelve of the first eighteen American presidents owned slaves. Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration and called slavery an “abominable crime,” yet he was a lifelong slaveholder. Fearful of dividing the fragile new nation, Jefferson and other founders who opposed slavery did not insist on abolishing it. It took 87 more years―and the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 13th Amendment―to end slavery.

Jefferson and the Enlightenment

Jefferson and other members of the founding generation were deeply influenced by the 18th-century European intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. Enlightenment philosophy stressed that liberty and equality were natural human rights. 

Colonial Americans argued that King George III and Parliament had denied them the basic rights of British citizens. Despite the pervasiveness of slavery in their society, the revolutionary generation envisioned a new American government that secured the rights and freedoms of its citizens. However, these rights and freedoms did not extend to slaves. 

The Declaration of Independence

In the Declaration, Jefferson eloquently announced the creation of the new American nation. He presented Americans as a self-governing people committed to the principles of liberty and equality in the face of British tyranny. “All men are created equal,” Jefferson wrote, and the importance of this ideal necessitated that “a people … advance from that subordination in which they have hitherto remained” in order to “institute new government.” The founders’ vision did not include one-fifth of the American population: enslaved men, women, and children who labored in nearly every one of the “Free and Independent States.”

“This Deplorable Entanglement”

Jefferson and many other patriots believed slavery should be abolished in the new American nation. Emancipation would fulfill the ideal that "all men are created equal."

Yet over the course of his life Jefferson himself owned 600 people. He was unable to extricate himself from what he called the “deplorable entanglement” of slavery.

Jefferson spent much of his life wrestling with and proposing various solutions to this national problem. But slavery was not abolished, and he remained a slaveholder throughout his life.

A Society Dependent on Slavery

Slavery made the world Thomas Jefferson knew. The colonial society into which he was born—in 1743 in what became Albemarle County, Virginia—would not have existed without it. Enslaved people tilled his father’s tobacco fields, cured the tobacco and packed it for shipment, cooked and served the family’s meals, cared for Thomas Jefferson and his siblings, and accompanied him to the College of William and Mary. The profits from slave-based agriculture made his parents’ household and lifestyle, and his education and exposure to the colonial capital of Williamsburg, possible. Though Jefferson came to abhor slavery, his livelihood depended on it.

Enlightenment, Freedom, and Slavery

Enlightenment philosophy strongly influenced Jefferson’s ideas about two seemingly opposing issues: American freedom and American slavery. Enlightenment thinkers argued that liberty was a natural human right and that reason and scientific knowledge—not the state or the church—were responsible for human progress. But Enlightenment reason also provided a rationale for slavery, based on a hierarchy of races..., "Slavery at Monticello: Paradox of Liberty," The Smithsonian African American History and Culture.

Honoring the Confederate Flag

"Lessons From The Civil War 150 Years Later: U.S. Should Stop Killing People Without Good Reason,"
Doug Bandow

"...Never has a war better illustrated the adage that the victors write the histories. What could possibly justify four years of mass slaughter and destruction? 

Southerners contended that states had a constitutional right to secede. There were fair arguments on both sides. However a dispassionate court might rule, the more important question was: what could warrant killing those on the other side of the debate? 

In particular, why should a democratic republic with a limited government built on a commitment to individual liberty respond to dissatisfied citizens desiring to join a new political community by killing them—as well as invading their lands, overthrowing their institutions, and burning their homes? Even if Southerners were acting foolishly and illegally in advocating secession, as I believe, they surely did not deserve this response.

Eliminating slavery would have offered a powerful moral cause for war. Human bondage was no minor blemish, but a fatal flaw of Southern society. And no government which uses its power to hold people in slavery can be either moral or limited.

However, abolition isn’t why the two sections fought. The seven Deep South states left out of fear for the security of their 'peculiar institution.' But ever-practical Abraham Lincoln called out the troops to maintain the Union, not outlaw human bondage. Racism was rife in the North and abolitionists were a decided minority. A call to arms for liberating slaves would have brought forth a trickle rather than flood of army recruits.... "

"...Despite the unnecessary casualties and destruction of the Civil War, most Americans today still reflexively call Lincoln a great president who 'saved' the country. He did end slavery, a notable achievement, yet war probably wasn’t necessary to do so. In fact, only one other nation abolished human bondage through violence—Haiti decades before. 

Every other slave society ended the awful practice peacefully. America was not even the last slave system to go; Brazil abolished the deeply rooted institution legally in 1888. No Brazilians died to free that country’s slaves...,""Lessons From The Civil War 150 Years Later...," Doug Bandow,Contributor, Forbes Magazine, April 9th, 2015.

Liberty and Justice for All

Human failures

Ignored and unnoticed

Life goes on-

Oblivious to the suffering

When life stops for those

We’ve Diminished, Dismissed and

Betrayed.

Our youngest victim:

George Junius Stinney, Jr.-

A boy of 14

Guilty before proved innocent

Legally lynched

Tried, Convicted, and

Electrocuted.

His final breaths

Agonizing-

A young life brutally

Extinguished.

Murdered White girls,

Thrown into a muddy ditch

A shroud of dirty water,

Covering bodies

Cold, bruised, broken

For riding bicycles

At the wrong place and time

While looking for “Maypops,”

Passion-flowers

Never found.

Heinously taken-

Their final moments

Horrifying,

Mary and Betty are laid to a

Restless peace.

While a "Prodigal Son’s" 

Body Burns

His Soul tormented in the

Hell of Abomination:  

Undue, Unmerciful,

Unrelenting. 

Watching over

Children and fools,

The Lord hears His prayers

After seven decades

A conviction vacated,

His punishment deemed

“cruel and usual”

For young George,

Poor and Black,

A man-child forever

At the wrong Place

And Time.

Grace and mercy

Right the wrongs of

Our injustices.

Yet cannot heal

Gaping wounds,

Bleeding for Forgotten Souls

Lost and obscured

In the shadow of prideful

Idealism.

\

"Seventy years after South Carolina executed a 14-year-old boy, 

 so small he sat on a book in the electric chair,

 a circuit court judge threw out his murder conviction."

"Now the Season Turns," Ōtomo no Yakamochi

Chūnagon Yakamochi by Kanō Tan'yū, 1648

Now the season turns--

autumn breezes become

winter's bitter winds.

To a man alone, the nights

will grow sleeplessly long.

Ōtomo Yakamochi

Poetry Foundation

"Seasons"

Chris Cornell

Man of Steel Soundtrack

"A Human Being Lives Here," Ebony Stewart

Write About Now

John Trudell

"Slam qui touche le coeur..."

Slam Francophonie 2016

"L'homme Parle"  

Unmarked Grave

Incandescent,

Sun-streaked blonde.

Ocean eyes of azure blue-

Illuminating, Alluring,

Burning.

A hearty laugh,

Like the sound of

Roaring winds and waves

A woman-child

Vibrant,

Replenishing barren,

Broken hearts.

Gentle spirit

On a troubled path

Tripping into an abyss

Her silhouette

Fading, diminishing

Dreams all but

Extinguished.

 Irrevocably,

The free-fall ends

Not with a deafening crash

But on a silent, sterile

Stone-cold slab-

A capricious sea of

Solid sand.

  No Exit(*J.P. Sartre, Huis Clos)

  The ephemeral epitaph,

 Of a soul forever lost

In a grave

Unmarked.

"You tell me your life is hopeless..." Erin Hanson

Origami Crane

Erin Hanson

Lalah Hathaway

Alsatian Language in Castroville

Though Alsace is a province of France, the language spoken there and passed down from generation to generation is an unwritten Germanic dialect and similar to the language spoken across the Rhine in Switzerland and Germany. The majority of Alsatian emigrants who came to Castroville during the 19th century were from Haut-Rhin (translation: upper Rhine), the southern section of the province around Mulhouse.  Their dialect is somewhat different from their northern neighbors in Bas-Rhin (translation: Lower Rhine), from Colmar to the Strasbourg area.

Alsatians are amazed when they encounter Castroville Alsatians speaking the same dialect today that their ancestors brought to Texas some six and seven generations ago.  The Alsatian spoken in Castroville has scarcely changed since 1844, except for borrowed English words where there is no Alsatian word.

At present the Castrovillians who converse in Alsatian are the older generation, though a few families still speak the dialect with their children.  The same is true in Alsace as the number grows fewer with each generation.

In an attempt to preserve their native language, Ralph "Blackie" and Annette Tschirhart (both deceased), with the help of their daughter, Connie Tschirhart Balmos, and granddaughter, Cathy Rihn Lester, wrote an Alsatian Dictionary.  First, they wrote a small handbook, and later the 90 page "Wordbuch".  It is a good reference for those trying to learn or write the language. Currently the book is out of print.

From time to time there are classes offered at the Castroville Public Library.  Anyone interested in learning a little Alsatian can join in.   Current Alsatian Club classes, Castroville Alsatian Language.

"La Danse des Canards"

Happy Birthday, my darlin'...

George

If eyes are windows of the spirit,

Your eyes as azure clear blue

As a soothing sea

Drench me with wisdom

If eyes are gateways to the soul

Your eyes, tender and trusting-

Like those of an innocent child,

Hold the keys to my heart.

In your eyes I see hope.

Through your eyes, I find joy

With your eyes, I have love.