Slave To The Ism

Dear Rosa; As a child growing up in New Jersey I went to the farm every summer and picked a variety of fruit and vegetables, string beans, tomato’s, potato’s; blueberries, strawberries, peaches.  It was hot and it was work.  We went to earn money to live not as a fun outing for the family.  Yes, it was hot, the hot sun beating down, turning the skin a deeper shade of colored than it was the day before. The dust created by the trunks picking up bushel baskets and of vegetables and fruit covered our heads and work clothes.  But the heat of the midday sun, the kind heat that makes you day dream as you inch along the row of beans, dreaming of jumping into a swimming pool, dreaming of air conditioning or just holding a cold bottle of coke to your forehead or neck while lying under the shade of a tree and longing to hear the lunch whistle blow.  Tired and longing to sit down.

Tired, Rosa Parks was tired and must’ve longed for a seat, to sit down on the bus that day.  A seat, her mind and feet could rest in on the ride home.  A seat to carry a worker from a day of labor to her home and family.  A seat has many important meanings; a place in which administrative power is centered, the seat of the government. A part of the body considered as the place in which an emotion or function is centered; the heart is the seat of passion.  The office or authority, etc, right to sit as a member in a legislative or similar body, a right to the privileges of membership, cause to sit down, to install in a position or office of authority.

Rosa Parks did not desire any of the previous meanings from the seat she chose, it was just her right to ride seated from one destination to another and it’s denial that became the spark that lit the flame that turned into a fire that consumed segregation in America.

After 400 years of blood, sweat & tears + a few mo, I’m in Nawleans fo the Ess-endz Fest (a 3 day black invasion of N. Orleans, I’ve caught sight of only about 100 or so white folks). I’m here with Sarah Dash to sing a couple of Labelle songs in a Essence tribute to a ‘Living Icon’ Patti LaBelle, our sister and the glorious lead singer of Labelle.

3 years after Katrina, huffed & puffed and blew the house of cards, betta known as levees down and turned lives upside down & inside out and ripped the wool from the eyes of the world about the state of the Nation known as The United States of America.
Today I saw a old friend in Nawleans weep about the devastation from Katrina, 3 years on. A strong, can do kinda woman who’s heart has been broken and slow to repair.

Through my eyes…People are living life in ‘parallel universe’ matrices; artificial environments that humans see as real.

Politicians sworn to serve and lead, old and new emperors dressed in old and new clothes!

The Middle Class; A parallel universe said to be related to ours, that may contain extinct humans; non existent.

The Rich have money to balm their wounds and soothe their conscience, bury their dead and fly away to another reality.

(Another reality; The French Quarter, famous and infamous for housing and encouraging the seven deadly sins, the water never touched! God is…??????????????)

The poorest of the poor who had nothing left to lose were stripped of their dignity, in the Dome, in Fema trailers, in hospitals and morgues and now in a city starved of it’s life blood, it’s people, scattered not too unlike the past, only this time they didn’t use auction blocks but buses.

H.O.P.E, an organization that bussed about 1,000 youths in blue & red t-shirts with wheel barrels and shovels, plastic bags, etc from all over The United States of America. They were spending part of their summer vacation helping to clear some remnants of the huge devastation to homes and communities. They were singing along with a youth band, drinking water and cheering each other!

- Nona Hendryx