James Arthur Baldwin - August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987
Happy Birthday Jimmy
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Today is the birthday of one of our greatest writer's and social commentator's. For those who knew him he was simply "Jimmy". For those who did not, and only know of him by his unparalleled body of work, he was James Baldwin.
I will never forget the chance I had to meet him when he lived in the south of France, in exile from this nation of his birth. Though he may have been physically removed from home, he was always linked emotionally and spiritually to his birthplace.
I wrote about him here before - on the anniversary of his death. Let us revisit him and celebrate his life of activism, and literary genius.
"Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."
I will never forget the night he took on William F. Buckley, Jr., architect of the right's conservative ideology, in the hallowed halls of the Cambridge Union. The debate between Baldwin and Buckley, which took place on October 26, 1965 was sponsored by the Cambridge Union Society, the oldest student debating society in the western world. The topic of the debate was "Has The American Dream been achieved at the Expense of the American Negro".
Baldwin won that debate. My family sat glued in front of the television cheering Baldwin on. He spoke for us all.
Here is a clip from the opening of the debate:
I strongly suggest that if you have never seen this debate to take the time and go and watch the entire program, which is available here.
What Baldwin had to say back then still resonates today.
He said (this is not a verbatim transcript of what he said but his written text):
The white South African or Mississippi sharecropper or Alabama sheriff has at bottom a system of reality which compels them really to believe when they face the Negro that this woman, this man, this child must be insane to attack the system to which he owes his entire identity. For such a person, the proposition which we are trying to discuss here does not exist. On the other hand, I have to speak as one of the people who have been most attacked by the Western system of reality. It comes from Europe.(in his speech he speaks of a doctrine of white supremacy which comes from Europe) That is how it got to America. It raises the question of whether or not civilizations can be considered equal, or whether one civilization has a right to subjugate--in fact, to destroy--another.
Now, leaving aside all the physical factors one can quote--leaving aside the rape or murder, leaving aside the bloody catalogue of oppression which we are too familiar with any way--what the system does to the subjugated is to destroy his sense of reality. It destroys his father's authority over him. His father can no longer tell him anything because his past has disappeared. In the case of the American Negro, from the moment you are born every stick and stone, every face, is white. Since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose you are, too. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6, or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.
It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace and to which your life and identity has not, in its whole system of reality, evolved any place for you. The disaffection and the gap between people, only on the basis of their skins, begins there and accelerates throughout your whole lifetime. You realize that you are 30 and you are having a terrible time. You have been through a certain kind of mill and the most serious effect is again not the catalogue of disaster--the policeman, the taxi driver, the waiters, the landlady, the banks, the insurance companies, the millions of details 24 hours of every day which spell out to you that you are a worthless human being. It is not that. By that time you have begun to see it happening in your daughter, your son or your niece or your nephew. You are 30 by now and nothing you have done has helped you escape the trap. But what is worse is that nothing you have done, and as far as you can tell nothing you can do, will save your son or your daughter from having the same disaster and from coming to the same end.
The NY Times pdf is also available online.
What was so powerful about Baldwin was not just his power as a spokesperson for black civil rights. He also spoke out as a black gay male.
Blacklight magazine (available online) has in its archives an article about Baldwin openly "coming out". For those of you not familiar with Blacklight:
1979 was a momentous year for the Gay movement. A decade after Stonewall, Lesbians and Gay men from all cultures and ethnicities were organizing in increasing numbers and demanding equal rights. The first National Gay March on Washington for Gay rights was held. For Black Gay men and Lesbians it meant blending the new Gay political thought with our Black identity. The first Black Gay political groups were formed and a new wave of Black Gay activists emerged.
In the midst of this social, cultural and political stew the idea of Blacklight was conceived. And in August of 1979 the first issue of Blacklight was published in Washington, D.C. under founding editor Sidney Brinkley. It was the first Black Gay publication in the nation's capital. Blacklight published from 1979 thru 1985. In those years it chronicled the birth of the Black Gay political movement and witnessed the havoc that was the dawn of AIDS.
In Baldwin comes Out, by James S. Tinney we read about his understanding of what it meant to be both black and gay-to deal with both racism and homophobia.
For the first time in his career, novelist James Baldwin openly identified with the Gay community by addressing more than 200 persons at a forum sponsored by The New York Chapter of Black and White Men Together (BWMT-NY). The forum was held June 5 in the Gay synagogue known as Simchat Torah on the West side of Greenwich Village. Speaking with candor and openness about his own homosexuality, Baldwin claimed that his life-long sexual orientation had never been a secret, but he had not always felt it was necessary, "or anybody's business," to openly affirm it. " Before I was seven years old," he said, "there were so many labels on my back beginning with 'nigger.' By the time I was 14, I went through a kind of nervous breakdown, which happened when I, was a preacher, and by the time I was 17, 1 had survived all the labels, including the label of 'faggot.' It wasn't and it isn't, easy." Baldwin briefly mentioned his becoming a Pentecostal minister in Harlem as a youth, and then declared, "I still consider myself a Christian," although he was careful to point out that he did not necessarily identify with institutionalized Christianity. Similarly, he explained that, while he is Gay, he does not necessarily identify with all of the institutionalized and "ghettoized" Gay community.
...
Gays, like Blacks, he believes, are being used as scapegoats for society's own fears. They are becoming victims of the anger Whites feel when they see that capitalism must, of necessity, give way to a new economic order of socialism. "Yet even White socialism seems unable to eliminate its racism," he added. He also claimed that White Gays exemplify the same racism, by and large. He referred to the fact that Gore Vidal, a celebrated Gay writer, has referred to him as a "jungle bunny."
In answer to a question from the audience, Baldwin seemed to indicate that his own political consciousness as an open Gay advocate has evolved over a period of time. It began with the writing of his book, Giovanni's Room. "That was something I had to do; I had to work through it," he said, in reference to writing the book. It is no secret that it is partly autobiographical.More recently, he admitted, his consciousness has brought him to the point where in his latest novel, "Just Above My Head," he is able to write freely about the homosexual relationship of two Blacks. (His previous works dealt with sex between Whites, or between Blacks and Whites but not between Blacks.) He concluded, "One has to reject, in toto, the implication that one is abnormal. That is a sociological and societal delusion that has no truth at all. I'm no more abnormal than General Douglas MacArthur."
Though Baldwin had no children, he spoke frequently to those of us who were younger, and his poignant and powerful letter to his nephew James, published in the Progressive in 1962 as A Letter to My Nephew should be required reading for all our youth.
This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that for the heart of the matter is here and the crux of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits to your ambition were thus expected to be settled. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity and in as many ways as possible that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence. You were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do and how you could do it, where you could live and whom you could marry.
I know your countrymen do not agree with me here and I hear them. saying, "You exaggerate." They do not know Harlem and I do. So do you. Take no one's word for anything, including mine, but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority, but to their inhumanity and fear.
Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words "acceptance" and "integration." There is no reason for you to try to become like white men and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them, and I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love, for these innocent people have no other hope. They are in effect still trapped in a history which they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men.
He spoke also to those of us who were younger militants. In his letter to Angela Davis, written in 1970 he wrote:
..as long as white Americans take refuge in their whiteness—for so long as they are unable to walk out of this most monstrous of traps—they will allow millions of people to be slaughtered in their name, and will be manipulated into and surrender themselves to what they will think of—and justify—as a racial war. They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance between themselves and their own experience and the experience of others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile, to become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country, their children, or their fate. They will perish (as we once put it in our black church) in their sins —that is, in their delusions. And this is happening, needless to say, already, all around us.
...The enormous revolution in black consciousness which has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of America. Some of us, white and Black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name.
If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.
Therefore: peace.
Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924. I will not include his full biography here, you can read it on many websites. In a nutshell:
The oldest of nine children, he grew up in poverty, developing a troubled relationship with his strict, religious father. As a child, he cast about for a way to escape his circumstances. As he recalls, "I knew I was black, of course, but I also knew I was smart. I didn’t know how I would use my mind, or even if I could, but that was the only thing I had to use." By the time he was fourteen, Baldwin was spending much of his time in libraries and had found his passion for writing.
During this early part of his life, he followed in his father’s footsteps and became a preacher. Of those teen years, Baldwin recalled, "Those three years in the pulpit — I didn’t realize it then — that is what turned me into a writer, really, dealing with all that anguish and that despair and that beauty." Many have noted the strong influence of the language of the church on Baldwin’s style, its cadences and tone. Eager to move on, Baldwin knew that if he left the pulpit he must also leave home, so at eighteen he took a job working for the New Jersey railroad.
After working for a short while with the railroad, Baldwin moved to Greenwich Village, where he came into contact with the well-known writer Richard Wright. Baldwin worked for a number of years as a freelance writer, working primarily on book reviews. Though Baldwin had not yet finished a novel, Wright helped to secure him a grant with which he could support himself as a writer in Paris. So, in 1948 Baldwin left for Paris, where he would find enough distance from the American society he grew up in to write about it.
Harlem Renaissance author Richard Wright, who also died in the month of November, was Baldwin's former mentor. Wright's classic "Native Son" was the subject of Baldwin's criticism in one of the essays in "Note's of a Native Son".
Baldwin 's fiction was much influenced by Wright's masterwork novel, Native Son (1940), which was heralded as the quintessential treatise on the psyche of the black American. For Baldwin, Wright, who mentored the young writer, represented a kind of literary father figure. Yet in much the same way that Baldwin had undermined his minister stepfather's power over him by outdoing him as a teenage minister, he usurped Wright with devastatingly critical analyses of his novel. The first of these criticisms ("Everybody's Protest Novel") was published by a short-lived French publication, Zéro (Spring 1949), and subsequently republished in Partisan Review (June 1949). Two years later, as a split developed between Baldwin and Wright, Baldwin would insure the schism with a thorough, accurate, but unflattering critique of Native Son in "Many Thousands Gone" ( Partisan Review , November/ December 1951). Native Son, Baldwin says, is unquestionably "the most powerful and celebrated statement we have yet had of what it means to be a Negro in America ." But, he opined, it is incomplete: ". . . though we follow [the anti-hero Bigger Thomas] step by step from the tenement room to the death cell, we know as little about him when his journey is ended as we did when it began; and what is even more remarkable, we know almost as little about the social dynamic which we are to believe created him." For Baldwin , therefore, Bigger Thomas "does not redeem the pains of a despised people, but reveals, on the contrary, nothing more than his own fierce bitterness at having been born one of them."
John Stevenson had this to say about Baldwin, in the Boston Book Review
Baldwin's essential message was simple, and very much of its time. America did not have a "Negro problem" (as it was often called then), but a white problem, which consisted in the inability of those who built their identities on being white to face up to the realities either of American history or of their own bodies, feelings and selves: "They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it....I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be 'accepted' by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this-which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never-the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed."
The problem, in other words, is one of white identity, which requires the projection of unacceptable facts and desires onto an alien other, and a solution is possible only through acceptance and love. Whites must learn to accept and love themselves and others, but in order for this to happen, blacks must also play a role: "...that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it....We cannot be free until they are free."
Toni Morrison wrote in her eulogy in the NY Times, about his courage:
It was you who gave us the courage to appropriate an alien, hostile, all-white geography because you had discovered that ''this world [ meaning history ] is white no longer and it will never be white again.'' Yours was the courage to live life in and from its belly as well as beyond its edges, to see and say what it was, to recognize and identify evil but never fear or stand in awe of it. It is a courage that came from a ruthless intelligence married to a pity so profound it could convince anyone who cared to know that those who despised us ''need the moral authority of their former slaves, who are the only people in the world who know anything about them and who may be, indeed, the only people in the world who really care anything about them.'' When that unassailable combination of mind and heart, of intellect and passion was on display it guided us through treacherous landscape as it did when you wrote these words - words every rebel, every dissident, revolutionary, every practicing artist from Capetown to Poland from Waycross to Dublin memorized: ''A person does not lightly elect to oppose his society. One would much rather be at home among one's compatriots than be mocked and detested by them. And there is a level on which the mockery of the people, even their hatred, is moving, because it is so blind: It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction.''
Here are some other quotes from him which I'd like to share:
On poverty: "Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor."
On the American system of education: "Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black."
On homosexuality: "Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality."
On hatred: "I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain."
On bigotry: "People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned."
On himself: "I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all."
For a bibliography of his work, Random House has a full listing.
Happy Birthday Jimmy!.
Those of us whose lives you changed will never forget you.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Can you be black and a gentrifier? Washington Post: ‘Gentrification’ covers black and white middle-class home buyers in the District
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A group of young black professionals in Anacostia has gathered over spinach-strawberry salad and white wine, when the conversation turns, as if often does, to what they call the “G-word”: gentrification.
“I used to think it was about race — when white people moved into a black neighborhood,” said lawyer Charles Wilson, 35, who lost to Marion Barry in the 2008 Ward 8 D.C. Council race. “Then, I looked up the word. It’s when a middle-class person moves into a poor neighborhood. And I realized: I am a gentrifier. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t like that word. It makes so many people uncomfortable.”
View how demographics in your neighborhood have changed over time.
“Actually, I thought it was if you see a white guy in Anacostia, listening to an iPod, jogging or walking a dog!” joked Sariane Leigh, 33, who writes a blog called Anacostia Yogi, putting her hand on her hip and waving a sweet-potato fry for emphasis.
The friends fold into laughter. They agree not to use the G-word, at least for one night.
Gentrification is always a delicate topic, especially in a city where it usually has meant well-to-do whites buying up affordable houses in predominantly black neighborhoods. The trend is reflected in recent census figures that show that the District is no longer a majority-black city and by ever-whiter neighborhoods such as Shaw and H Street Northeast.
But black gentrification is increasingly redefining the G-word and changing the economics of places like Anacostia.
Anacostia, a neighborhood once synonymous with crime and violence, now offers yoga studios and chai lattes. Young black professionals are spurring development and gentrification of Ward 8. (Washington Post)
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When will prosecutors be held accountable for their choices? Colorlines: Raquel Nelson and the Aggressive Prosecutions of Black Mothers
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aquel Nelson, who was convicted of second-degree vehicular manslaughter after her four-year-old son was killed by a drunk driver, will not be going to jail after all. On Tuesday a judge sentenced Nelson to 12 months of probation and 40 hours of community service, and offered her a new trial, which she’s since decided to pursue. She faced three years in prison.
It was a stunning move in a dramatic case that’s captured national headlines and for criminal justice reform advocates, exemplified the racialized impacts of aggressive prosecutions.
On April 10, 2010 Nelson’s son A.J. Newman was killed by a drunk driver while the family attempted to jaywalk across a busy street. They’d just gotten out at a bus stop and were out later than Nelson would have liked after having missed their first bus. Their home was directly across a four-lane street and like many other passengers, they decided to cross directly to their home. The nearest crosswalk was more than three tenths of a mile away from the bus stop. While waiting at a divider, A.J. slipped out of his mom’s grasp and into the street. Nelson and her other daughter followed, and they were all hit by a drunk driver careening down the road.
The driver of the van, Jerry Guy, who had two previous hit-and-run convictions on his record, fled the scene. A.J. died. Guy later pleaded guilty and confessed that he’d been drinking that day. He served six months of a five-year sentence.
After the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published an article raising alarm about the dangers of jaywalking, instead of, say, the dangers that poor urban design pose to transit-dependent families, the solicitor general decided to prosecute Nelson for endangering her children.
Earlier this month an all-white jury of middle class folks who admitted they had limited experience taking public transportation in the area found Nelson guilty of second-degree vehicular manslaughter and reckless endangerment.
It was just the latest in a year of headline-making reports of mothers, all of them single parents, and all of them women of color, who’d been aggressively prosecuted for supposed transgressions they’d committed while trying to raise their children.
In January, Ohio mom Kelley Williams-Bolar was found guilty of a felony for using her father’s home address to enroll her daughters to a better out-of-district school. Williams-Bolar was charged with defrauding the local school system of $30,500. And in April, Connecticut mother Tanya McDowell was charged with larceny for “stealing” her son’s education when she enrolled him in a neighboring school district’s kindergarten. School officials say she “stole” more than $15,000 worth of education for her son.
(thanks to the CIJ folks for this story)
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Remember Tea Party backed Republicans aren't racist. Gawkers: Republican: Working with Obama Like ‘Touching a Tar Baby’
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Rep. Doug Lamborn likened compromising with Obama to "touching a tar baby" on talk radio today. But he probably didn't mean to use the racially charged term in a racist way, right? There's no way he missed the lesson from John McCain's "tar baby" blunder, or Mitt Romney's "tar baby" blunder, or Tony Snow's "tar baby" blunder, right?
Given the famed political correctness of Lamborn's district in Colorado Springs—home of sexually repressed meth head pastors and family-focused homophobes—I'm guessing this is all a big misunderstanding. Lamborn probably meant to say was "touching a star, maybe" or "clutching bizarre rabies." Linguistic interpretation is in the ear of the beholder, so if you think this is a racist, then probably you are the racist, so there.
Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO)
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France must open its closed society and give immigrants and the less fortunate real opportunity, says this French politician. The Root: After Norway: Free the French!
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The masks are off! Finally, a sector of the French political class has shown its true face: conservative nationalism. From the provocative parading of pork-sausage sandwiches in predominantly Muslim neighborhoods to a National Assembly proposal to ban rap groups formed by immigrants to the xenophobic comments about the Ecology Party candidate for president of France, Eva Joly -- of Norwegian origin, no less -- it's all a show of biceps by the conservative nationalists.
The phenomenon is not limited to France, because in addition to President Sarkozy's declaration in February on the No. 1 TV network that "multiculturalism is a failure," Britain's David Cameron and Germany's Angela Merkel have taken the same position. And of course, there was the heinous massacre in Norway by a killer blinded by hate for Islam and a multicultural society that he saw as "spoiling Norway."
In France, the conservative nationalists see no further than your origins, be they cultural or social. "Tell me where you're from and I'll tell you how far you can go," they whisper. Unfortunately, this petty determinism, this suicidal conservatism, is embedded in all stages of French society, particularly at the top of a society more pyramidal than ever, contradicting our democratic pact.
This conservative nationalism recruits openly on the right, but its influence is also felt on the left. While it is divided into the far-right fringe of the populist right (Sarkozy's UMP party), the partisans of the extreme right (National Front) and the neo-reactionaries among the leftist Socialists, these conservative nationalists are disputing the same political turf, hiding behind a facade of talk, their real intent to restore an old social order. Together they are defending a hardened vision of France, an ethnicized vision that is not explicit but that they pretend conforms to the ideals of the republic.
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A cheap and portable blood test could provide a breakthrough for diagnosing infections in remote areas of the world, a scientific study says. BBC: Micro blood card offer easy tests
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The mChip is about the size of a credit card and can diagnose infections within minutes, according to a study in the journal Nature Medicine.
Prototype tests for diseases such as HIV and syphilis in Rwanda showed almost 100% accuracy, it said.
The US-developed device has a projected cost of $1 (60p).
This would make it much cheaper than the lab-based tests currently used.
The plastic chip contains 10 detection zones, and can test for multiple diseases with only a pinprick of blood.
Results can be seen with the naked eye or with a low-cost detector.
"The idea is to make a large class of diagnostic tests accessible to patients in any setting in the world, rather than forcing them to go to a clinic to draw blood and then wait days for their results," said Samuel Sia, a professor at New York's Columbia University who is a lead developer of the device.
Hundreds of tests using a prototype of the device were carried out in Kigali, Rwanda. They showed 95% accuracy for HIV and 76% accuracy for syphilis, the study says.
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The African Union has announced it is to hold a summit meeting to pledge help for the victims of Somalia's drought. BBC: Somalia famine: African Union calls 'pledging summit'
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The statement comes after considerable criticism in the African media of the failure of the continent's leaders to help famine victims across the Horn of Africa.
The AU said the pledging conference would bring together heads of state and international donors.
The United Nations says the famine is spreading across southern Somalia.
The African Union statement was made by its deputy chairman, Erasmus Mwencha, during a visit to the AU peacekeeping mission in the Somali capital, Mogadishu.
"I ask the African continent, from the northern cape to the southern cape, to look hard at how they can contribute to alleviating the suffering," said Mr Mwencha.
But he gave no date for the summit.
His call came as the United Nations warned that the crisis was intensifying, with more than 12 million people in Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti urgently needing help
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
At a time when deficits and debt ceilings are debated; at a time of record unemployment and income inequality; at a time when demegoguery of minorities and the common working stiff is the franca linqua of the land; I stand at the corner of Main Street and Commercial Avenue and watch a...
Train Above Pedestrians
Where moonlight angles
through the east-west streets,
down among the old
for America
tall buildings that changed
the streets of other
cities circulate
elevated trains
overhead shrieking
and drumming, lit by
explosions of sparks
that harm no one and
the shadowed persons
walking underneath
the erratic waves
not of the lake but
of noise move through fog
sieved by the steel mesh
of the supporting
structures or through rain
that rinses pavements
and the el platforms
or through new snow that
quiets corners, moods,
riveted careers.
Working for others
with hands, backs, machines,
men built hard towers
that part the high air,
women and men built,
cooked, cleaned, delivered,
typed and filed, carried
and delivered, priced
and sold. The river
and air were filthy.
In a hundred years
builders would migrate
north a mile but in
these modern times this
was all the downtown
that was. And circling
on a round-cornered
rectangle of tracks
run the trains, clockwise
and counter, veering
through or loop-the-loop
and out again. Why
even try to list
the kinds of places
men and women made
to make money? Not
enough of them, yet
too many. From slow
trains overhead some
passengers can still
see stone ornaments,
pilasters, lintels,
carved by grandfathers,
great uncles and gone
second cousins of
today—gargoyle heads
and curving leaves, like
memorials for
that which was built to
be torn down again
someday, for those who
got good wages out
of all this building
or were broken by
it, or both, yet whose
labor preserves a
record of labor,
imagination,
ambition, skill, greed,
folly, error, cost,
story, so that a
time before remains
present within the
bright careening now.
-- Reginald Gibbons
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The Front Porch is now open. Grab a chair - relax and chat with us for a while.
