Posts Tagged ‘slavery’
Toni Morrison Wrote the Novel That Will Help America Heal
August 12, 2019
One of America’s most prophetic artistic voices has left us. I am speaking, of course, of the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison’s passing last week at the age of 88 years. She was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, living American writers. And she is the writer whose voice is…
Read MoreOur Common Memory
July 11, 2019
The verbal dustup between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and journalist Ta-Nahesi Coates that flashed across the country’s television and computer screens last month has faded into blogospheric obscurity, with what passes for national discourse having long since moved on to fresher nodes of rancor and resentment. The occasion, you may recall, was a US…
Read MorePoetry Friday: “Onesimus”
August 5, 2016
In this month of painful national and international news, Tania Runyan’s poem “Onesimus” offers a gut-deep breath of brotherhood. The poem recounts the story of Philemon, a new Christian Paul addresses on behalf of Onesimus, both Philemon’s fugitive slave and also a new convert. In “Onesimus,” Runyan singles out, perhaps, the most marginalized and voiceless…
Read MoreSleeping in Slave Quarters at Sweet Briar College
November 12, 2015
From my office window I can see the pale yellow plantation house, its sharply pitched roof peeking from behind a huge conifer, its two Italianate cupolas, one at either end of the house. Since 1901, Sweet Briar House has been the home of the president of Sweet Briar College, a small women’s college in the…
Read More