‘Gallantry’

On Confederate Hill with Nero the Pict

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

My good friend Nero the Pict and I had three hours to find Confederate Hill in Loudon Park, between Wilkens and Frederick Avenues, in West Baltimore, before meeting Erique for training.

At the front gate of the park are buried about a regiment's worth of Maryland Union soldiery, right on the main drag where the descendants of those they fought to free sell dope and murder at cut-rate prices.

Further back in the cemetery, beneath centuries old oaks, which the grounds keepers allow to fall prey to parasitic vines, are buried a battalion-strength of Maryland Confederates, 650 in number.

Five large monuments grace the hill overlooking an abandoned, bronze-doored mausoleum, buried in the opposite hillside, a gracefully haunted hilltop, tastefully away from the Yankee road and so much more appropriate to the Lost Cause these men fought for.

A relation of John Wilkes Booth's lies there in the sun.

A number of unknown soldiers rest there, somewhat accounted for among the ranks of others, from Alabama, Georgia, Maryland, mostly men who died of starvation and illness imprisoned at Point Lookout between October 1864 and February 1865.

Among them was a member of a Maryland Artillery unit who won the Confederacy’s highest honor, and survived the war into honored old age.

A man who commanded cavalry in a Maryland raid has a monument dedicated to his gallantry in the soft shade of the massive oak.

Next to him, beneath the monument to an unnamed CSA general reminiscent of Robert E. Lee, the wife of this grey rider has her own better preserved and touchingly inscribed monument, proclaiming her a woman of grace.

Among them is a monument to a youth who was slaughtered by federal troops in the paleface Baltimore Riot.

Most striking to me was that this hill for the remembrance of those we hate because they were better than we are has retained the solitude of a time earlier than theirs, under the shade of a tree that three men could barely circle with hands joined, a tree such as their slave ancestors felled by the millions to make this land ripe for the twin tyrannies that would deprive them of prosperity, march them off to war, kill them and then replace them.

The irony is that they fought to preserve their own poverty at the hands of a slave race and their masters and those who defeated them ultimately fought to ensure that their descendants would be driven from their hometown by the savage scions of those they freed.

Seeing the many battle flags and remembrance cards left by an organization dedicated to preserving their memory, and measuring the grace of their shaded place next to the ranked white rows of union boys whose headstones face one of the most blighted boulevards of their ravaged hometown, one wonders if it’s better to fight for the cause bought and lost or the one won and sold?

Perhaps it is only of importance that these men remind us that there was once a time when men were credited for loyalty and courage rather than having the luck of being owned by the winning machine.

1865 marked the end of the gross, government-mandated ownership of humans and the advent of its refined evolution, a world where one is reduced to a debt cipher and must either be lied to that his people were either the only slaves, or never slaves, so that the debtor might not be haunted by the fact that he lives under the same exact threats as his shackled and branded ancestor, most likely a doomed youth who was put to murdering the world’s largest living things so that his grandchildren might be replaced by a people better designed to thrive in a barren world bereft of their shade.

At least the bones of these 650 men and a few of their women lie beneath a shaded patch of our stone memories, lingering still and stoic in a world dedicated to the collective pursuit of social amnesia.

(c) 2018 James LaFond, photos courtesy of Nero the Pict

Strangled Stones

Surveying a Plantation Era Cemetery

Walking along the concrete tomb of the Dutch Village of New Utrecht, I look through the rusty wire fencing, ten feet tall yet unable to prevent clothes, trash and beer bottles from being slung into its precinct by the undermen who skulk about. Walking the three sides of the two-acre perimeter, bounded on the fourth by a modern church, it is difficult to envision this land before it was sheathed in concrete, asphalt and brick.

However, hope does spring infernal, as one notes the great oaks and some lesser tries having taken hold recently and of old.

This cemetery, in the bowels of Brooklyn, occupies the site of a church raised by the Dutch in 1700, a generation after their conquest by the English, on the site of the long gone village. This site was witness to the death of American General Nathaniel Woodhull on September 20, 1776. According to the historical plaque, this site is only of interest due to the British-American clash of arms nearby. The true origin of this resting place of the dead, like all things American, is shrouded in mystery, intentionally ignored, nothing in the record to evince a curiosity as to the settling of this place, the mention of New Utrecht made as if the Dutch had lived in this place since the beginning of time.

The 52 full and partial rows of gravestones suggest the interment of perhaps a thousand.

Fully a third are fallen or otherwise destroyed.

A number of monuments to leading men are apparent—all unread, for the gates are locked against the subhumans who perhaps toppled the 18-foot obelisk of some tons into the church wall, barely scraping it.

The church itself hosts three congregations: one black, one Chinese, one Hindi/Punjabi/Urdu.

The precinct stretches from the walls of the church where the great are interred, to a lonely bank, held together by the roots of a great tree, engulfing one tiny headstone, the size of a Bible, made of clean white rock, seemingly being dragged under by the roots swarming it like a sea monster a ship.

As I kick aside the dried dog shit at my boot toes and the bleak clouds of today roll in overhead, I look around to see people just as alien to those who planted this village of the dead as they were to those they took it from.

Perhaps the Chinese are right to speak of us as Ghost-people.

Although the Dutch of New Amsterdam who settled this site in 1652 owned whites, only the burials of unfree blacks are recorded today.

Consider though, that in 1680, in New York, Peter Sluyter and Jasper Danckaerts described a master making his dying white slave dig his own grave (see page 134).

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(c) 2018 James LaFond, photos by Mescaline Franklin

So Her Master May Have Her Again by James LaFond

A History of Runaway White Slaves in Plantation America: Part Two

Between 1617 and the 1850s, as many as a million white women were enslaved in Plantation America: as house servants, sex slaves, field hands, bar maids, unwilling wives and laundresses. If any of these women could be made to take the slightest tan they might be passed off as mixed and therefore black, which would consign them to a full lifetime of bondage. Within this book are the stories—ranging from fragmentary to epic—of Caucasian and mixed-race women, brave women who made their break for freedom in a man’s world.

Available in paperback.

So His Master May Have Him Again by James LaFond

A History of Runaway White Slaves in Plantation America: Part One

Did you know that the story of black bondage in Early America, as horrible as it was, quite literally paled in comparison to the more than 200 years of white enslavement? The African slave trade in North America did not begin in earnest until 1678 and would not outstrip white slave shipments until 1740. Did you know that when George Washington served as President in Philadelphia there were as few as 100 black slaves in that city, where it was illegal to hold blacks for more than six months, in the Quaker state of Pennsylvania, which held over 200,000 whites in bondage for terms of 7-14 years? It was for this very reason that the founder of his nation chose to free his black slaves and replace them with Germans. Did you know that the first slaves in English speaking America were Welsh-English colonists intentionally marooned on Roanoke Island and then enslaved by Indians? Then welcome to the savage world that American Historians have lied about for nearly 100 years—welcome to the land were people were literally “planted” so that others might own them.

Available in paperback.

A Bright Shining Lie at Dusk

A Partial Exhumation of the American Dream

In A Bright Shining Lie at Dusk the author probes the evil foundation of the United States of America, which was—and according to him, will be again—white slavery, and traces the muted echoes of the slave mind down through the American consciousness to the present day. This is a reference work for the unchained mind in two parts. A Strange Seed: Plantation America as a Physical Slave Farm and Fruit of the Lie: Modern America as a Mental Slave Farm.

Available in paperback.

Into Wicked Company by James LaFond

An American Slave Memoir in Verse

With footnotes, additional Caucasian-American slave poetry and biographical appendices by James LaFond, author of Stillbirth of A Nation and America in Chains.

Available in paperback and Kindle edition.