Presidents Day
Queen Mother Moore was a tireless worker for reparative Justice.
People don’t come here for freedom. Maybe they did. Maybe some still do, but when I have done informal polls of my first- and second-generation immigrant students, the overwhelming majority have routinely cited opportunity (read money) as the primary reason that they and their parents relocated to the USA. Yes, there was an Iranian student in a writing class, relieved that she was no longer harassed by the morality police for wearing too much mascara or not enough clothes. But the money is here, and if you’re smart enough to leave where you are to come here, you too can have money and the realization of lush-life dreams only possible in the Land of the Free. It is not at all complicated. My friend from Cameroon asked me if I can imagine what it’s like to live in a country where everyone wants to leave. Yes, I can, but I’ll explain that later.
Black people (secretly) despise Abraham Lincoln, hate that lanky, gaunt motherfucker because every schoolchild everywhere learns that Abe Lincoln freed the slaves. It is a dogma undented and undiluted by tales of contraband Blacks aiding the union army as couriers, spies, or saboteurs. Come on, now. Abe Lincoln freed the slaves, and he did it with paper. What this means to us, from a place that most of us would need six months on Fanon’s couch to be able to acknowledge we are in, is quite complicated, but also quite psychically damning.
We, who were close to four million strong at the end of the Americans’ Civil War, were capable of building a splendid nation for white people. It was a new nation founded on stolen land, made fat by stolen hands. And we were also a new nation, a Black nation welded together from disparate African peoples, enlarged by each generation born into America’s Peculiar Institution. We could make the whites quite comfortable, but we could not make ourselves free. There was a white man in Washington who could do that with godlike words — a proclamation. Their president could do what Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and countless other antislavery generals could not. Armed as they were with clubs, machetes, and whatever firearms they could seize, the great heroes of America’s slave rebellions (with all their prophetic courage) were only capable of irritating a well-armed owner class. Turner was hung. Vesey was hung. Scores of their followers were hung, and hundreds, perhaps thousands of Blacks in the areas of their uprisings were flogged and starved, collectively punished for birthing and harboring such black devils. Lincoln’s words on paper carried power that Black manhood did not.
This country never finished its Civil War.
Queen Mother Moore was born in New Iberia, Louisiana, now a tidy municipality, a little over an hour’s drive southwest of the state capital. She is widely regarded as the founder of the modern movement for reparations. When I met her in the late 80s, she was approaching 100 years old. She had very light-colored skin and spoke militantly in a delicate voice about restitution for the damages done by their nation to ours and was crystal clear that what we were owed had little to do with stolen labor and everything to do with stolen time. Our history and our future were stolen, dissolved during the middle passage, beaten almost beyond reach, in open-air prisons — work camps and rape camps that no one should ever call something as placid-sounding as a plantation.
Understand, please, that our problem with Lincoln is that he did not free us from America, just from its southern plantocracy, and his freedom did nothing whatsoever to restore all that stolen time. Forward and backward, my people were released into a temporal wasteland within which the masses of us still stagger like refugees.
Art and artifacts are hourglasses containing, not sand, but liquified imagination, so my people (in Louisiana but farther south than New Iberia) invented a music that was large enough and strong enough to store all that purloined time, should we ever get it back. White people called this strategy for temporal storage jazz. We called it nothing. We had no need to name it.
Yes, we all want to leave. We want to leave America, not in boats or planes, necessarily, but in time. We want to leave America stranded in its own time, frozen in its own temporality, so that we can resume a story that belongs authentically to ourselves. The forced miscegenation of their time with ours, their rhythms with ours, their history with ours, sits uncomfortably within the body. It is a lie in plain view of everyone.
Harriet Tubman is the world’s most famous abolitionist. If her face is ever put on twenty-dollar bills, it will be one more very valuable thing (like our language, our religion, and our names) that white people took from us. This is as obvious as the taste of blood. Slavery is evil (and effective) because it converts the sanctity of human life into the utility of capital. A child can see that. Most white people can, even if they don’t bother to say so. What is ultimately tragic to the point of hilarity is that large numbers of Black Americans would gladly condemn Harriet Tubman’s noble visage to the face of American currency in the interest of some elusive and nebulous good. The woman known as Black Moses spent her life running from American money, putting distance between it and her body and the bodies of other Blacks.
In the 20s, Queen Mother Moore left the South and moved to Harlem (yes, from New Spain to New Amsterdam) where she joined the radical Black forces that were gathering there. In New York, she worked with Black communists who were envisioning an alternative to the economic system that had been built by Black suffering. She joined Marcus Garvey’s movement for repatriation and studied African culture intensively. She also formed and led the Harriet Tubman Association, an organization that worked to better the conditions of black women through higher wages and more education. In 1955 she returned to Louisiana, and it was there, in the thick of Jim Crow’s most violent season, that she began her work organizing for restitutive justice in the form of cash compensation for the grievous and persisting damages that America inflicted on Black people. In 1962, Queen Mother Moore took her campaign for justice to President Kennedy, the United Nations, and the US Congress.
It is difficult to imagine Queen Mother Audley Moore not finding repugnant beyond redemption the idea of “honoring” Harriet Tubman by using her symbolism to scrub away the residual filth left by Andrew Jackson. Sadly, for the sake of some virtue called representation, many of my people enthusiastically embrace this brutal mockery of Tubman’s likeness and memory. For whites, American Exceptionalism is a character defect. For my people, it is a painful psychological disorder.
Ashley D. Farmer. (2016). Mothers of Pan-Africanism: Audley Moore and Dara Abubakari. Women, Gender, and Families of Color, 4(2), 274–295.
This article was originally published in the Yes We Cannibal Yearbook.
Yes We Cannibal is located at 1600 Government St, Baton Rouge, LA 70802
Thomas Stanley is a professor of sound art and consciousness at George Mason University and the author of The Execution of Sun Ra. He performs AfroFuturist Soundscapes as Bushmeat Sound System.
