Urban Thought Collective

It’s over now, but February is my favorite month of the year. Nearly a whole nation of people gathered in their respective dwellings and in sports bars across the country to celebrate the respective births of Langston Hughes and myself. Folks delighted in the cornucopia of delightful fried finger foods and raised many a glass in our honor. Toward the end of that day, the black and gold clad Steelers from Pittsburgh kicked an oblong pigskin ball through a giant H in Langston’s honor. It’s also the month that some of the rich history that Black people have contributed to the American experience is permitted by the mainstream to see the light of day.

The PBS stations usually do a good job with broadcasting some entertaining documentaries for the occasion, creating that rarest of instances where I am actually rushing to get my remote and sit on the couch attentively during prime time. This time around, one particularly moving piece was “Looking for Lincoln” put together by notable scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In it, Mr. Gates explores the mythology of our 16th president while simultaneously discussing ol’ Honest Abe in both a 19th Century as well as a 21st Century framework.

For those that haven’t heard it before, Lincoln didn’t exactly abolish slavery with the stroke of his pen because he was just a swell guy. In fact, a closer look at some of the speeches he made, especially some from the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates about the matter of slavery, reveal a much less flattering side of him. For instance, although Lincoln sided in favor of blacks with respect to whether or not the Declaration of Independence applied to them (Douglas said it didn’t), he did not necessarily believe in equality of the races.

“There’s a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the races from living together on terms of social and political equality and I as much as any other man am in favor of the having the superior position assigned to the white race.” Lincoln is on record as saying.

Acclaimed author/historian Lerone Bennett’s interview in this piece is particularly poignant, stating that he went from holding Abe as a one of his childhood heroes to a markedly different position after his discoveries of such statements. Bennett reminds us that while “the greatest generations of white people ever produced in this country (1830-1860)” were moving blacks on the Underground Railroad, speaking out against slavery and calling for equal rights between, Lincoln was silent during that period.

Another popular sentiment expressed with regard to ol’ Abe was that, at best, he was a reluctant politician pulled along by monumental events like the Civil War. I’ll throw conflicted into that mix as well. To look past the sometimes quite subtle and often deft maneuvers that he executed en route to Washington and the agility with which he negotiated an incredibly tumultuous political climate would be akin to walking by the color purple in a field and failing to notice it. And that, as Shug Avery so eloquently stated, just “pisses God off.” Other than our man Barack, perhaps no other presidential candidate before or since has been as brilliant a tactician and been so effective in marketing himself to the masses as Lincoln, having had hundreds of portraits of himself done to project the most positive and inspiring image possible.

He was a man in transition to be sure, ascending from the aforementioned denigrating comments on race and equality, to a more moderate almost Garvey-esque solution involving Liberia and Panama. “My first impulse would be to free all the slaves and send them to Liberia… to their own native land…,” he once said during his presidency. It’s probably necessary to tack an adverb on to the word conflicted that I used early: deeply conflicted. On the one hand, he was trying to keep the country from splintering apart and on the other, there was his conscience. “If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong,” he is also credited with saying.

Oddly enough, his strife invoked images of Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules in “Pulp Fiction.” (What? You didn’t think that my “-ness” wouldn’t come just because I’m writing about something serious, did you?) Don’t worry, it’s not the “What ain’t no country I ever heard of. They speak English in What?…SAY WHAT AGAIN!” Jules (although maybe you could picture him snapping back at the diminutive Stephen Douglas, after making a point in their debates. “Oh…you were finished! Well allow me to retort!”) or even the “Mmmmm…that IS a tasty burger. Vincent…ever have a Big Kahuna Burger?” Jules either. Perhaps I was flipping channels during the commercials and caught Tarantino’s classic for the umpteenth time on A&E or something. I don’t know, but that’s who I thought of while watching “Looking for Lincoln.”

I pictured Lincoln at this crossroads, knowing that he must do right by abolishing slavery to some degree, but fully aware of the very volatile state of affairs in his midst as the Nation was on the verge of tearing itself apart. I t was as if, like Jules, he had just had this incredible epiphany and was ruminating aloud as he and his right hand man Seward sipped on their favorite single malt.

“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men,” he mused, reflecting on the death and destruction of the Civil War, perhaps inhaling the stench of the corpses at Gettysburg. “Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children,” he continued, pondering the slavery issue. “And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you. I been sayin’ that sh** for years. And if you ever heard it, it meant your a**,” he went on, perhaps eluding, regrettably to his edict to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and also imprison 18,000 Confederate sympathizers without trial, in a “W”-esque move. “But I saw some shi**this mornin’ made me think twice. Now I’m thinkin’: it could mean you’re the evil man. And I’m the righteous man,” turning toward Jefferson Davis, who is also taking a load off (if you’ll allow me to re-write a most improbable bit of history),taking another sip and looking out over the fields at Gettysburg, taking a deep breath and continuing, “…or it could be you’re the righteous man and I’m the shepherd and it’s the world that’s evil and selfish. I’d like that. But that sh** ain’t the truth.” Pausing for dramatic effect as only Samuel L. can (and Abe probably could too), he probably took another sip and said, “The truth is you’re the weak. And I’m the tyranny of evil men.”

Turning the bottom up to get the last drop, he concluded. “But I’m tryin’,…. I’m tryin’ real hard to be a shepherd.”

Destah Owens is a single father of two from Northern California and proud UCLA Bruin who travels the world for his job as a computer engineer. His blog, “Soufflés in Saigon,” is exclusive to Urban Thought Collective.