Why I Love Leonard Pitts in And So It Goes

Because he is one of the greatest syndicated newspaper columnists in our country…that’s why.

After 400 years, it’s still a long and winding road

It is said that the ship came in out of a raging storm to land at Point Comfort in what is now Hampton, Virginia, just downriver from the English settlement at Jamestown. No one thought to record the date, except that it was in late August of 1619 – 400 years ago.

George Washington would not be born until 1732. The Mayflower would not bring the Pilgrims to North America until the following year.

The vessel that landed that day was an English ship called the White Lion and she carried cargo taken in an attack upon a Spanish ship in the Gulf of Mexico. Arriving in Virginia, the captain agreed to trade his stolen goods for “victuals.”

It may have been the most portentous bargain ever struck.

Because the White Lion brought rhythm and blues to America. It brought B-Boy swagger, Jesus moans, stormy Monday and melancholy trumpet solos that seemed to stretch for Miles. It brought uh huh and uh uh and mmm hmm and okra and banjo and bongo and juke and jive and what is hip. It brought the color purple and the bluest eye, brought Porgy and Bess and Jesse B Semple, brought the invisible man and ain’t I a woman, too. It brought nightmares and an incandescent dream.

In other words, it brought black people – “20 and odd Negroes” kidnapped from Angola and rechristened with European names: Antoney, Isabela, William, Angela, Frances, Margaret, John, Edward and more. They were hardly the first Africans in the so-called New World. African explorers had traipsed these shores for at least a century – far longer, by some reckonings.

But though they weren’t the first Africans in America, they were the first forced into indentured servitude, the system that became slavery. A few years later, Antoney and Isabella had a child they named William Tucker, after their white master. He was the first black child born in America. He is where African-American history begins.

Four hundred years later, that history deposits us here, on a monumental anniversary in the midst of a strange and unsettling time. The most nakedly racist president since Andrew Johnson. Victories long ago won being unraveled. Voting rights under assault. Unarmed black people routinely killed under color of authority. Mass incarceration devastating whole communities. The wealth gap and the health gap and the education gap yawning wide. And barbecuing while black is a thing.

Four hundred years later, it seems fair to wonder. Where are we? The Miami Herald posed that question to six people, a cross-section of observers. The answers that came back were uniform in their sense of sober disheartenment.

Robin DiAngelo, who is white and the author of “White Fragility,” says we are living through a “particularly terrifying moment.”

Jemele Hill, former ESPN host, staff writer for the Atlantic and host of the “Jemele Hill is Unbothered” podcast, says it feels like “we’re in a state of limbo.”

And Yvette Nicole Brown, an actress known for her roles in “Community” and “Avengers: Endgame,” as well as for a feisty Twitter presence that tackles issues of race and inequity head on, says simply, “I’m scared. If I’m honest, I’m really scared.”

Maybe William Tucker was scared too. About the first African American, we know almost nothing. It is not unreasonable to believe, however, that the child born in 1623 or ’24 may have lived long enough to see the system of indentured servitude in which he was reared change into something more sinister.

As Dr. Hilary Jones, associate professor of history at Florida International University, reminds us, indentured servitude was not a hard and fast racial caste system. “For example,” she says, “at Jamestown, there were intermixed and intermingling between enslaved African people and European indentured servants. There were mixed-race populations, there were some liberties and freedoms that we might not associate with the plantation economies that grow up a century or so later. By 1700, the laws have changed, the interaction between what we say as white and black now or slave and free completely changes in order to subjugate black people to structures of power that are based on ideologies of slave ownership.”

That ideology mandated the complete cradle-tograve possession of one group of people by another based on color of skin, a 17th-century construction called race. “Four hundred years later,” says Jones, “we are living with the legacy of that racial segregation, of the laws, the way in which the commercial system was organized, to rely solely on African slave labor or black slave labor.”

So where do we go from here? The Herald posed that question to the same six people, and the answers that come back were uniform only in their lack of uniformity.

Dump Trump, says anti-racism activist Jane Elliott. Realign the resources, says noted pundit Roland S. Martin. Truth and reconciliation, says Tim Wise, an anti-racism author. Educate white people about what racism means, says DiAngelo. Black people must own what they create, says Hill.

And Brown, known on television for funny faces and snappy comebacks, says speak up, tell truth to power, whenever and wherever you can.

“Every time you see darkness,” she says, “you’re supposed to shine a light on it, every time you see a marginalized person, you’re supposed to speak up to them, every time you’re asked to give of yourself, be it time, money or intellect, you’re supposed to give it for the greater good. That’s where we go from here, everybody picking up their part of this puzzle and putting it together so we have a brighter tomorrow.”

It takes a moment to understand why her words feel incongruous. And then you realize: This is the same woman who said she was scared. Indeed, this is the woman who said she was without hope. The slaves, she said, “broke chains and ran away and fought for freedom – because they had hope. And I feel like now I don’t feel hope. I don’t feel hope within myself.”

But there she is in the next breath exhorting people to speak up, speak out. “Staying quiet hasn’t helped anybody,” she says. “I’ve had people say to me that I’m too vocal and because I’m a public person and because I’m on television or I’m in movies, I need to watch what I say. And I promise you: I will never watch what I say because of finances. McDonald’s is always hiring. If I lose everything I have because I spoke up about what is right, then take it all. I will never be silent when I see something crazy – ever. Even to my own detriment. That needs to be the mindset that everybody has: They cannot fire all of us. They can’t kill all of us. Right?”

Think about it for a second. It’s a manifesto of courage. From a woman who says she is scared.

And the funny thing is, you believe both. Why can’t she be both frightened and brave? Courage without fear, after all, is just recklessness. Courage despite fear is, well … courage.

And that has been – has had to be – the defining feature of the African-American experience from slavery to Trump, the thing that brings us to this place 400 years later and will take us forward from here. Not a cowardly, knee-knocking terror, mind you, but the ability to make a sober assessment of the circumstances, the odds and the dangers and then decide to act, despite them all.

Surely the slave was scared when he thought of running away. But he ran.

Surely the freeman was scared when it came time to leave the old plantation. But he left.

Surely the sharecropper was scared when he asked for a ballot. But he asked.

Surely the seamstress was scared when the bus driver told her to give her seat. But she sat.

Now the actress is scared, watching Donald Trump grin and give the thumbs up as the 1940s come rushing back on black people like a freight train. But there’s always work at McDonald’s.

Because in the end, you make the most of it. You do what you have to do. You get on with it.

Maybe their history is what made black people brave. Maybe their bravery is what made black people’s history. Maybe both.

All we know is that, 400 years ago, a ship came to America out of a storm. The men and women it carried found themselves in an unknown land for an unknown purpose with an unknown people jabbering in an unknown tongue. They could have no sense of what the future would bring. Surely, they were scared.

And then they disembarked.