Covidicah

and

The Message of the Miracle of the Mayonnaise Jar

It was the time of Covid, in the year 2020. The land was quiet. Too quiet for some and, yet, too loud for others. The landscapes without people were eerily beautiful, but also apocalyptically depopulated.

For several decades before Covid, the country’s leadership was, shall we say, below average. And even the presidents who showed some real ability to lead were unable to unite us all and often proceeded timidly, when they needed to be brave. But the particular president serving in office at the time of Covid was even unable to surpass the low bar set by his predecessors.

He was a buffoon some said. A fat head, said others. More serious minded folks,called him a white supremacist, or a misogynist, or both. Some who were less serious, or fatalistic about the chances of the country surviving Covid, made fun. His hands, they said, loudly and repeatedly, were very small—baby hands. And he had a little, tiny dick, they would say, though history is mostly agnostic about the size of his penis.

So, okay, then. Enough about that. I just didn’t feel like this would be good, full, truthy story, if I didn’t mention the diverse speculations about the president’s tackle. Little tackle. Tacklette. Whatever.

We can say that then, as now, there were other centers of power, and some of them had more influence than others. There was one center of power that was like a fox ranch, or something like it. The foxes on that ranch were big supporters of the otherwise helpless—did I say, helpless?—I mean, hapless president. The foxes on the ranch were big supporters of the hapless president. Some of the foxes were sleek and blond and talked nonsense, but you wouldn’t have expected foxes to be fountains of wisdom, would you?

Regardless, it does appear that fox babble was a big source of ideas for the hapless president. That was never going to turn out all right and, let me tell you, history shows that under the president’s leadership, shit did hit the fan, the air, the water, everything.

To make matters worse, there was a constitutional assembly, called the House of Elitists (or something—history is vague on the name), which was led by another woodland animal; the morose, turtle-faced Mitch, who had a deep and strategic objection to democratic process and a fondness for incompetent judges. Turtle-faced Mitch, it is reported, ended up in the soup.

It was definitely a no-good, very bad time. In our city, the zip codes that suffered the worst violence, also recorded the most deaths from the virus. The same zip codes also had the largest air-polluting railyards, the highest number of industrial air-polluters, the most kids suffering from asthma, and the fewest number of people with health insurance. The whole country hit the deep do-do lottery jackpot.

Local and regional governments didn’t invest much in public trans, creating vast profit opportunities for private trans. The same ideological indifference to the idea that we could all succeed together that characterized policies that crippled public health and public trans plagued public education. The opportunities for individuals to profit off of the kinds of needs that we now enshrine in our code of human rights (our Code of Human Rights) made a hash of public education. We were throwing away lives and achievements and whole communities of skills and talents with which we could have built (and, eventually, would build) the Beloved Community.

As if all of this was not bad enough, the earth itself was heating up—I mean like in giant, biblical degrees. And the policy response to this—well, let’s say it wasn’t science-based.

People hoarded, which is to say, they bought extra amounts of things they didn’t need. Especially in the early phase of the pandemic. This was no surprise. In an environment when many people didn’t have work, and many jobs were dangerous, and the good things in life seemed so unachievable, people were scared.

They were afraid to get sick and suffer and, maybe, die. So they took care of themselves by buying more than they needed of things that were available and seemed affordable. Now, we know, of course, that they didn’t need so much stuff. And they bought some of that stuff in quantities that were sufficient to ensure that their families wouldn’t run out of whatever they hoarded for generations.

That’s why we own so many pencils. Somebody, your great-grandfather, maybe, hoarded pencils. They were cheap, I’m sure; available, I’m certain; and he liked pencils, I’m guessing; so, our family is never, ever going to run out of pencils.

That’s what happened down the block with Ms. Alice’s family, I think. Someone thought that having a lot of plastic forks around would be a comfort—I know, go figure—so now she owns thousands of plastic forks. That’s why she’s always going, “Here. Have some plastic forks.”

Some people even hoarded toilet paper, which they used for wiping their butts. A lot, I guess. That bit of hoarding makes a little more sense because, as we know, everybody poops.

Unfortunately, the toilet paper hoarding apparently caused widespread inconvenience, or emotional distress, maybe. Eventually, people realized that there was enough for everybody and started sharing their toilet paper. That’s when people started saying that, “Solidarity is the path to and the purpose of the surplus,” which eventually became the third and, I think, most important meaning of our greeting, “Salaam.”

At any rate, people started mobilizing. That’s what happens when people start realizing that change is in the air, and that they have the power to shape that change. They mobilized to kick the scary and notorious Orangish Man out of the People’s House.

And though we seem to have lost interest in the exact identity of the Orangish Man, we do know that they voted him out of office. And after he was out of the way, they started voting pretty much nonstop for things they did want. They voted for universal health care. And for decent housing for all. And for good, green jobs.

They voted and voted and voted. They voted money out of voting. Boy, did they vote. They voted good public schools until public schools were where everyone wanted to go to school. That project took a long time. A lot of voting.

Eventually, they were all, hell, let’s just vote socialism and be done with it. But here’s the thing. You’re never done with it. Democracy is not perfectible. Notwithstanding the attitude of the old-school, uber-powerful, lifetime-appointed judges favored by the Orangish Man and Turtle-faced Mitch, democracy changes as the people will it to change.

And how do they express their will? They vote and vote and vote. They even voted that forever after we, all of us, must vote to heal the least of us, heal the body politic, heal the air and water, heal the earth, our mother, heal our mother who was here before Covid and has been here ever since and will always be here and will always love us. We vote to love our mother back.

So that’s what this holiday is really about, to remind us to vote to love the earth back. That’s why at this holiday celebration, around this community table, we tell about the Covid miracle of the mayonnaise jar that held only enough mayonnaise for a single turkey sandwich, but miraculously lasted to make enough turkey sandwiches with fresh lettuce and mayo to feed every hungry person that lived here before the Beloved Community and would live on to be a part of that new understanding of ourselves.

So, there’s the Covid Miracle of the Mayonnaise. And the Message of the Covid Miracle of the Mayonnaise is this: We heal what we can and deepen our understanding of that which we cannot heal. And we pledge to each other that down the road we will try to heal that which we cannot heal now.

And now we close this Covid night with the recitation of the Four Covidicah statements:

 “Solidarity is the path to and the purpose of the surplus.

“The social surplus belongs to the people.

“The anti-social surplus was the way of things before Covid.

“The surplus is the path to and the purpose of solidarity.”

Amen

Perry Hall, Restless Seeker

“For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length--and there I travel looking, looking breathlessly.”

from The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Carlos Castaneda, University of California Press, 1968

Perry Alonzo Hall, Jr., my friend and comrade for more than 50 years, died this past April. Born September 15, 1947, Perry filled many roles in life. Father, brother, activist, musician, storyteller, truthteller, scholar and author, Perry was also a relentless voyager across both terrestrial geographies and interior spaces.

He was raised up in the Brewster Projects in Detroit by parents Phyllis and Perry Alonzo Hall, Sr., along with siblings Charles, Emily, Harriet, Arthur and Patricia and, sometimes, half-brother Norman. Much of Perry’s childhood was spent in a neighborhood with a rich culture shaped by many successful Black businesses and local musicians who were themselves among the most revered musicians in the country. Perry, or Lonnie, as his family called him, graduated from Detroit’s Northern High School as senior class valedictorian in 1965.

Beginning as an undergraduate on a full academic scholarship at the University of Michigan, Perry was one of the first generation of Black students who aggressively pushed majority white colleges and universities for courses that acknowledged the reality of Black life in the United States. As Perry wrote later, the courses he took in sociology, history and literature when he first entered college, “failed in their ability to encompass our realities.”

In a two-year hiatus from academia, Perry hitchhiked across the country a number of times, sometimes doing so under the influence of consciousness-altering experiences and substances, He and I spent the summer of 1971 in Detroit working at Ed Bowyer’s Insight Magazine. (I wrote about that summer in The Spirit of Phyllis Hall.)

The first issue of Insight featured a cover illustration of Detroit’s iconic statue, the Spirit of Detroit, tying off an arm and shooting up. Needless to say, that graphic depiction of the heroin scourge destroying African American neighborhoods, was not universally appreciated.

Perry and I were also part of the Insight team that conducted a group interview of Black Detroit-area Vietnam veterans, faithfully recording their raw and poignant battlefield stories, their outrage over the lack of jobs for returning veterans, and the decline and abandonment of minority neighborhoods in the city. While at the magazine, Perry met Geneva Smitherman (author of Talkin and Testifyin, The Language of Black America and Black Talk, Words and Phrases From the Hood to the Amen Corner), who would become a valued colleague and friend in his subsequent career in African American Studies.

Later, as a doctoral student at the Harvard University School of Education, as acting director of the Wayne State University Center for Black Studies, as a lecturer at the University of Alabama Birmingham and, finally, for 28 years a tenured faculty member at the University of North Carolina, Perry continued the fight to legitimize and expand the field of African American Studies as a fully enfranchised, academic department.

As part of Wayne State’s institutional marginalization of Black Studies, the Center never became a full academic department while Perry was there. And though he replaced Geneva Smitherman as director of the Center, the university never elevated him from “acting” to full and permanent director. It is this career of struggling against white resistance and bureaucratic inertia, while compiling a record of intellectual achievement, that Perry recounted in his book, In the Vineyard, Working in African American Studies.

Academically Perry paid particular attention “to the importance of folk, popular, or traditional forms of expressive culture in understanding the overall context of black life in any given historical moment,” as he wrote in In the Vineyard. “The core of African-based orality on which folk/popular culture is based suggests that oral forms such as music can tell about more aspects of the story of black people than customary literary sources alone.”

A musician, himself, Perry would sit down at every piano he encountered on his journey through life, playing pieces across the full range of Black music, loving, especially blues, gospel, R&B and Motown. I’ve been married twice and at both weddings Perry took over the piano, playing tunes like Stormy Monday and Stevie Wonder’s I Just Called to Say I Love You and I Heard It Through the Grapevine--the original Marvin Gaye version, of course.

But it was his childhood spent in Detroit immersed in a city where blues, R&B and Motown thrived, and where he played the piano at family gatherings, which featured all forms of gospel, holiday and responsive singing, that created Lonnie’s readiness to both believe in and investigate Black music traditions as a primary means of shaping African American communities and culture. And the strengths and talents of his multi-generational family also inspired Lonnie to undertake the work of researching and writing the history of the Beard and Hall family and sharing that story at both small and large gatherings of the clan in which he came to assume the role of griot.

As an adult, Perry was also a friend and colleague united in solidarity with a multi-racial, multi-cultural universe of working folks, artists and scholars. No one worked harder to make himself clear about complex matters than Perry. He was sometimes disappointed when people couldn’t quite grasp the details of what he was trying to tell them, but he never stopped focusing and refining his message so that others might understand what mattered.

It was Perry who first explained to me the idea that it was the exploitation of African American labor and the expropriation of their wealth that undergirded white privilege in the United States. He had to school me many times on that point before I came to understand the full meaning of what he was sharing with me. I’ve started rereading In the Vineyard since Perry died and when I get deep into it, I can still hear Perry’s voice and I know that in his writing I will be able to hear him always. Our past together will never really be over.

“What constructive ways can be fashioned to engage the abundant energies that hip-hop culture has collectivized among much of our youth? Will the soul-transforming of that folk/popular tradition emerge once again to redeem their future? .... As the discourse continues among schools of thought in field, it will be incumbent upon the participants to frame the discussion in terms of the opportunities and challenges that now confront us. It is this ground, inscribed with a catalog of critical issues facing black communities in the United States and elsewhere in the African diaspora at this critical historical juncture, upon which African American Studies now stands. And it is this ground over which it must tread on a road that leads through the end of this century and into the next millennium.”

from In the Vineyard, Working in African American Studies, Perry A. Hall, University of Tennessee Press, 1999.