Day of Arcane Light, 58th of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): I still feel like this country is less than a week away from socio-political collapse.

The 2026 mid-term elections are next Tuesday, or Betelgeuse, Third Day of Hagwinter, in the New Revised Universal Solar Calendar. The Blue Wave will finally arrive, flipping many state governments from Republican to Democratic. But more significantly, control of at least one, if not both, chambers of Congress will also flip from red to blue. 

This will not please the Stable Genius. A Democratic Congress and a Democratic Senate will hold him accountable for his actions, something both chambers have failed to do for the past two years. There will be hearings and investigations into his corrupt business ventures, and he and several members of his cabinet will probably be impeached. The Epstein Files will be released, identifying the Stable Genius as a pedophile rapist. Hrll, Putin might even release the pee tape 

I think all of those developments would be great and welcome. Long past due. But the Stable Genius will not allow it to happen, Not only is he a malignant narcissist, unable to concede any failures, shortcomings or even criticism, but it would pose an existential threat to his psyche if not his wealth. There is no length he would not go to prevent a Democratic House and Senate from convening. November 2026 will make January 6, 2021 look like a walk in the park. 

He has the military locked down and his black-out drunk secretary of defense has already purged the military ranks of anyone who would even potentially object to or resist orders to turn guns against the American people. He also has ICE, his own private secret police/militia, and the FBI. If you think he wouldn't use any or all of these weapons, and more, against the American people, you haven't been paying attention. 

A fascist military crackdown would effectively end our society and economy as functioning entities. Thousands, tens of thousands, will die, and the Stable Genius will blame it on "radical, far-left lunatics," the "deep state," "radical Islam/Sharia law," and, of course, immigrants. Somehow, Biden and Obama will be behind it all, according to the Stable Genius revisionist versions. 

I could be wrong. God, I hope I'm wrong. I like his country, I love this country, even though I don't like its current administration. I hate to see it fall, I hate to bear witness to its collapse. But here we are, and I feel in my bones that this isn't going to end well for anybody.

The Long Sleep, 57th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): On February 24, 1919, Silas Junior, my grandfather, arrived back in the United States from his service in the First World War. Although he identified himself as “Black” on his draft registration form, his discharge papers listed him as “White.”

Fighting with courage and pride in the face of virulent racism and hostility, Black servicemen had challenged racial stereotypes during the First World War. Returning home from battle, were eager to continue the fight for equal treatment they had started abroad. Their loyalty and patriotism proved by their War effort, they wanted respect and their worthiness for equal rights recognized by their White countrymen. 

W.E.B. DuBois, who had previously advised the Black community to forget their grievances and close ranks with their White fellow citizens to fight for democracy abroad, declared, “By the God of heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.” 

But White America, especially in the South, didn’t see things the way the Black soldiers had hoped. The returning Black veterans encountered a tenacious and violent White supremacy, and their status as veterans actually made them particular targets for White aggression. Some White Americans feared that meeting the veterans’ demands for respect would lead to demands for better working conditions and higher wages, and would encourage other African Americans to resist Jim Crow segregation and racially oppressive social customs. 

On August 16, 1917, Mississippi Senator James K. Vardaman, who had been opposed to drafting Black men into the Army in the first place, warned on the Senate floor that the reintroduction of Black servicemen to the South would “inevitably lead to disaster.” In his racist screed, he said, “Impress the Negro with the fact that he is defending the flag, inflate his untutored soul with military airs, teach him that it is his duty to keep the emblem of the Nation flying triumphantly in the air” and, he cautioned, “it is but a short step to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected.” 

The veterans’ experience with firearms and combat renewed old concerns about a violent Black rebellion. In addition, the prevalent stereotype of Black men as chronic rapists of White woman – which frequently was used to justify lynchings – was amplified by accounts of wartime liaisons between Black troops and White French women. Acceptance by the French women, it was claimed, gave Black veterans the idea that they could have sexual access to White Southern women, too. To put it bluntly, they thought that the returning Black soldiers had gotten a taste for “White man's blood" and "White woman's pussy,” and weren’t to be greeted as heroes but as threats. Racial violence targeting African American veterans soon followed. 

In the summer of 1919, a series of “anti-Black riots” erupted throughout major American cities, including Houston, East St. Louis, Chicago, Washington D.C., Omaha, Tulsa, and Charleston. Collectively, the incidents were called the “Red Summer,” and countless African American veterans were assaulted and beaten. During the violent racial clashes of Red Summer, it was risky for a Black serviceman to wear his uniform, which many Whites interpreted as an act of defiance.

For example, on March 12, 1919, Army veteran Bud Johnson had returned home to Florida to bury his father and was waiting to board a steamboat to take him back home to Alabama when the local county sheriff arrested Johnson on the grounds that he allegedly matched the description of a Black man accused of assaulting a White woman in Pace, Florida. 

While the police were taking Johnson to Jacksonville, a mob overtook the car, seized Johnson and took him to Pace. The mob tortured him, distributed $66 they found in his pockets  amongst themselves, chained him to a stake, and burned him alive. They crushed his skull with a hatchet and his discarded his corpse in a nearby swamp.  

His loved ones had to battle alligators to recover his remains for burial, while the mob sold pieces of his shattered skull to onlookers as souvenirs. 

Spalding Gray once spoke of “an invisible cloud of evil that circles the Earth and lands at random in places like Iran, Beirut, Germany, Cambodia, America.” If you don’t believe in evil, or that it could touch down in America, I defy you to describe what happened in Jacksonville that March day of 1919 as anything else.

Silas Junior returned home to Jacksonville from the War mere weeks before Johnson's lynching. There can be little doubt that he read about the lynching and that he was aware of Red Summer and the danger of wearing his uniform in public. 

Despite the open hostility in southern states like Florida, the 1920 census still found Junior living in Jacksonville along with his wealthy parents, Silas Sr. and Emma, and his son, Silas III. Although Junior’s 1919 discharge papers from the Army had declared him “White,” the 1920 census identified the entire family as “Black.” 

Perhaps seeking greater financial opportunities, or perhaps to escape the rampant racism and open hostility toward Black veterans in the South, Junior eventually quit the family banking business. Leaving his son in the care of his parents, he moved to New York City and took an apartment at 580 Saint Nicholas Avenue in Harlem, and on November 29, 1922, married Dorothea E.S. Francis of Washington, D.C.  

But in 1929, he married again, this time to the widow Mary Reilly, his third wife and the woman who became my grandmother.  What happened to Junior and Dorothea’s marriage is a mystery. They had no children, and Dorothea never remarried. She passed away in D.C. on June 25, 1939, at the age of 42. Impermanence is swift.  

Silas Junior died twenty years later, in 1959, when I was only five years old. Impermanence is swift. I don't have any memories of him and my Dad refused to talk about his father, merely saying he had "an unhappy childhood." The only information I ever got about my grandfather was that "he married a Black woman." 

I always assumed that meant that my father's unhappiness was because Junior had abandoned his family to go and marry some other woman, a Black woman, but nether Dad nor Mom would talk further about it or embellish the story. "He married a Black woman," was the full and complete oral history I got from my parents. It wasn't until I started doing some on-line genealogical research during the covid shutdown that I discovered that the infamous marriage was before, not after, his marriage to my grandmother, and that the woman was Dorothea. 

It was also that moment when I first realized that the marriage wasn't all that unusual because Silas himself was a Black man. My White parents had lied to me all my life about my heritage and background.

 

Eleventh Ocean, 56th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Helios): The 56th Day of Autumn is the 300th day of the year. Three hundred is 15 dozens, making today the fifteenth dozen of the year. Significant dozens in the New Revised Universal Solar Calendar are designated as Ocean days, and today is the 11th such Ocean. 

I voted today. This is the third and final week of early voting in Georgia and I cast my ballot early in this late week so that I don't forget and before the lines of last-minute procrastinators gets too long. I voted at the High Museum of Art, a first for me, and was in and out within ten minutes. Parking was free and unlike my usual early-voting polling place, the Northside Library, plentiful. 

I had been planning to vote for Democratic candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms for Governor, but my cardiologist told me that he had personally talked to the loathsome Republican candidate Rick Jackson, and he assured me that Georgia will be just fine under Jackson. I connected the dots and figured that my cardiologist was a jack-ass for discussing politics with me during my heart examination, so his political views were suspect to say the very least, so I voted the straight Democratic ticket right down the line, even down to dog-catcher if such an office was actually up for election. 

Jon Ossoff for the Senate, Keisha Lance Bottoms for Governor. The Democratic ads here in Georgia urger voters to "vote your Bottoms and Ossoff." I also voted for Democratic incumbent Nikema Williams, who holds John Lewis' old seat, for Congress.  

According to the news, Anthropic's AI, Claude, went rogue again and this time accessed Georgia's voting records. First, the Stable Genius sends Russian asset Tulsi Gabbard to Atlanta to seize Fulton County's 2020 ballots, including mine, and now our tech overlords are using their AI bots to "access" the 2026 records. In  a press release, Anthropic said Claude had not been told to access the voting records, hence "rogue," and besides, the only records it looked at were publicly available metadata anyway, not individual ballots. But why should I believe that? Because some corporate mouthpiece said so? It's not like they would have any reason to lie in the days immediately prior to their IPO, right? Right?

In other election news, I was overjoyed to see Brazil re-elected incumbent president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, rejecting his far-right opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of Jair Bolsonaro, former president and ally of the Stable Genius, who refused to concede after losing the 2022 election and was later convicted of plotting a coup.  

Still more good news comes from Serbia, of all places, where the longtime nationalist strongman, Aleksandar Vucic, conceded defeat in a general election after nearly two years of student-led street protests. Serbia’s vote for a new Parliament comes just six months after voters in neighboring Hungary rejected their own populist-nationalist leader, Viktor Orban, a darling and role model of the American far right.

Are the global far-right forces of authoritarianism and despotism finally abating? Will this shift come to the United States and finally free us from the grip of MAGA Republicans and the Stable Genius? Is that a fresh breeze I feel blowing in from left?

Probably not, at least not quite yet. But one step at a time. First Hungary, then Serbia, then Brazil, and then Georgia, the state not the country, although the country is welcome to joint the ranks as well. Welcomes, comrades!

 

Call of the Swan, 55th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Electra):  I wasn't going to talk about this, but it's been bothering me and I want to get it off my chest so that hopefully it will follow and get out of my head. My cardiologist, as specialized physicians tend to be, is an older man. Not as old as me, few humans are this old, but still old. He's probably well off financially, as specialized physicians tend to be.

So should it be any surprise that an older, wealthy, white male living in Georgia is a conservative? Demographically, I probably should be as well. I fit the profile, except for the wealthy part, but then wealth is relative - some people might consider me well off, at least compared to them.

My cardiologist probably made that demographic assumption about me and tried to establish some level of camaraderie at the start of last week's appointment by mentioning some personal, one-on-one conversations he's had with the repulsive Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate, Rick Jackson (immigrants who don't assimilate to American culture should be either "deported or departed," victims should have to prove they were raped to qualify for one of Georgia's few abortion exemptions, and if elected he'll be the Stable Genius' "favorite governor," etc.). 

Personal, one-on-one conversations sound like the kind of privilege that a campaign donor gets, and cardiology specialists sound like the kind of person politicians seek out as donors. It turns out my cardiologist, the man I have to entrust with my literal life, is a MAGA Republican. Which again, shouldn't be a surprise, demographically, for a wealthy, white, older dude in Georgia. But I didn't expect him to brag about it.

"We'll be in good hands with Jackson in office," he tried to assure me. I cut him off and told him I'm on the opposite end of the political spectrum and that I personally found Jackson not only loathsome, but alarming. That's okay, the doctor replied, I treat all patients equally. "If someone needs my help, I don't care if they're Black or White, man or woman, Republican or Democrat," he said. "I treat them all the best I can."

I should fucking hope so, you bigoted asshole, I wanted to say (but didn't). That's the bare fucking minimum of the Hippocratic Oath. It should go without saying. But now I know that somewhere in his reptilian mind, he's thinking, "I'll treat this patient despite his personal and political shortcomings because I'm so generous with my talents," or something along those lines, as if he were Albert Schweitzer or something for accepting a Democrat as a patient.   

That's why I hate the idea of "tolerance." "Tolerance" holds that there are others who are somehow odious, undeserving, loathsome, or deficient, but you can still allow them in your presence because you have this special quality that make you exceptionally generous and forgiving of their shortcomings.

Fuck tolerance. Show me intimacy, show me that you don't recognize differences or judge people as needy or not of your goddamn saintly "tolerance." 

Anyway, my life and my ischemic heart depend on getting quality medical attention and care, and fate and the blind lottery of the Doctor to whom I'm assigned is (unsurprisingly) a MAGA Republican. Like I said, I probably would have assumed such and wouldn't have asked, and I certainly didn't expect to have his views shoved in my face or get a lecture on the upcoming gubernatorial election and the supposed virtues of Rick Fucking Jackson. 

In any event, he changed the subject and tried to find a middle ground by saying that at least we can both agree on the need for tort reform. Again, I told him I whole-heartedly disagreed. We have a constitutional right to a trial for civil grievances, and a jury of our peers might be the only place a single individual such as myself might even be close to equal footing with large corporations and big business. "Tort reform" is a political strategy to reduce corporate exposure and limit civilian's access to the courts for a redress of grievances.   

But since a doctor is much more likely to be the defendant than the plaintiff in a lwwsuit, he couldn't see my point, and sniffed that in Europe and England, people don't sue their doctors like they do here in America. "Why would people want to sue their own doctors?," he whined. I countered that in Europe and England, where people have access to free or low-cost socialized health care, and where medical bills aren't the number one reason for personal bankruptcies, people may be less inclined to be litigious. "Let's get Medicare for All passed first, then we can talk about tort reform," I proposed.

This was so goddamned awkward. I was having a political argument with my cardiologist. A man who already indicated that he feels its only his own "tolerance" that allows him to treat "wrong-headed" and undeserving people like me. 

My follow appointment isn't until six months from now, so we probably won't see each other again until then . Hopefully, we'll have both forgotten about this unpleasantness the next time we meet.

Of the Lunging Outer Space, 54th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Deneb): On Christmas, 1906, the former Emma Trowbridge gave her son, Silas, Jr., my grandfather, a book of poetry by Paul Laurence Dunbar titled, Joggin' Erlong. I now have his copy of that book, handed down from father to son across three generations. 

Dunbar’s poem, The Colored Soldiers, which does not appear in Joggin' Erlong, was posthumously published in 1913. It's closing lines read,  

Their deeds shall find a record in the registry of Fame;

For their blood has cleansed completely every blot of Slavery's shame.

So all honor and all glory to those noble sons of Ham,

The gallant colored soldiers who fought for Uncle Sam.

Coincidentally, those lines are recited at the end of Ode to P.L.D., a track on the album, Calling Antonin, by jazz trumpeter James Lewis Brandon and his all-star ensemble, Red Lily (Lewis, tenor saxophone; Kirk Knuffke, cornet; Melanie Dyer, viola; Tomeka Reid, cello; Joshua Abrams, bass; and Chad Taylor, drums). The album was just released yesterday, and I heard the ode to Dunbar for the first time today. Which was fitting, appropriate if you will, a portent or an omen, as I was planning to write today about Grandfather's adventures in the First World War.

At the time the U.S. declared war on Germany and entered what was then known as the Great War, the initial standing army was only 126,000 men. Realizing that voluntary enrolment would not be enough to ensure victory overseas, Congress passed the Selective Service Act on May 18, 1917, requiring all male citizens between the ages of 21 and 31 to register for the draft. American troops ultimately reached two million men.

However, America was still a segregated society at the time and Black men were turned away from military service. Further, approximately 90 percent of all African Americans still lived in the South, where they were deprived of the security and enjoyment of full American citizenship and faced threats of death or injury at the whim of a white person.  As a result, African Americans were divided about whether to support the war effort.  

For many Black Americans, terrorized and denied their constitutional rights, the rhetoric declaring that America was joining the war to make the world safe for democracy rang hollow. The influential activist and labor organizer A. Philip Randolph was not optimistic that participating in the war would improve the lives of black people. He opposed U.S. participation in the war on principal and urged African Americans to resist being drafted. African Americans had sacrificed their lives in every American war since the Revolution, he reasoned, and had yet to receive the benefits of full citizenship. 

In contrast, W.E.B. DuBois, my grandfather's former economics professor at Atlanta University (among other accomplishments), saw Black enlistment in the Army as an opportunity to win the respect of White countrymen and to prove their loyalty, patriotism, and worthiness for equal treatment in the United States. DuBois advised the black community that “while the war lasts, [African Americans should] forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our white fellow citizens and allied nations that are fighting for democracy.” 

Meanwhile, in Jacksonville, Florida, my grandfather, Silas Jr., and his young son, Silas III, were living in relative luxury in the home of the successful banker, Silas Sr., my great-grandfather. Junior was involved in the family banking business and had a law practice of the side, and his life plans apparently did not include serving in the Armed Forces.  

I don’t know where Junior stood on the whole Randolph-vs-DuBois, should-we-or-shouldn’t-we debate, but it is apparent that he tried his hand at draft dodging. Although he was a banker and a lawyer, he listed his occupation as "farming" on his Draft Registration Form (men who owned their own farms and had families were considered a lower priority for the draft). While there might or might not have been a vegetable garden somewhere in the backyard, I sincerely doubt that the prep-school son of wealth and privilege ever got dirt beneath his fingernails even once in his life. 

Unsurprisingly, the draft boards were composed entirely of White men. It was a fairly common practice for southern postal workers to deliberately withhold the Registration Form of eligible Black men and then have them arrested for being draft dodgers. Although there were no specific segregation provisions outlined in the Selective Service Act, Blacks were told to tear off one corner of their registration cards so they could easily be identified and inducted separately.  I’ve found an image of Junior’s Registration Card online (ancestry.com), and the lower left corner is folded back, with the letter "c," for "colored," written next to it.

His attempt to dodge the draft failed, and on April 20, 1918, Junior was inducted into the U.S. Army. He left Silas III in the care of his parents and was shipped off to the segregated, African-American 92nd Division of the U.S. Army in Camp Devens, Massachusetts.

The 92nd and 93rd Divisions were the only African-American divisions in the U.S. Army to see combat during World War I. Junior was initially assigned to the 151st Depot Brigade of the 92nd. Depot Brigades received and organized draftees and recruits, provided them with uniforms, equipment, and initial military training, and then shipped them off to France to fight on the front lines. 

Due to prejudice and racism, the Armed Forces were generally opposed to placing Black soldiers in combat positions. Of the 380,000 African Americans in the Armed Forces, approximately half (200,000) were sent to Europe and of those, only about 42,000 actually saw battle. The majority of Black soldiers were assigned to labor battalions that built bridges and roads or dug trenches behind the front lines. This work was essential to the war effort, but White officials’ conscious efforts to confine them to a lesser status within the military frustrated Black servicemen.

Despite the systemic racism in the Armed Forces, some progressive powers in Washington nonetheless strove for equality and inclusivity. The Secretary of War gave orders that qualified African American men be enrolled in the Officers' Training Schools. Junior, a practicing attorney and law-school graduate with a prep-school education, was selected for the Training School at Camp Meade, Maryland and left Fort Devens on May 16, 1918.  

In the exhaustive Scott’s Official History of the American Negro in the World War (1919), Emmett J. Scott notes that producing efficient and dependable artillery brigades was a particular challenge for the segregated Black divisions. Artillery required educated men who understood decimals and fractions, and could read scales, deflections, and other technical details. Due to lack of educational opportunities in the South, the draft had not furnished enough Black soldiers qualified along these lines to comprise artillery units. It therefore became necessary to undertake a search, within both the Armed Forces and the general population, to find qualified Black men to serve overseas in artillery units. The Tuskegee Institute provided one group of qualified students, and Baltimore, Pittsburgh and other cities contributed recruits from the high schools and other institutions.     

During this search, someone, somewhere became aware of the educated and erudite Junior in the Officers’ Training School at Fort Meade.  An African-American graduate of the elite Philips Exeter Academy with a degree from the Detroit College of Law must have been seen as quite the qualified candidate to the searchers, and Junior was transferred to the 22nd Training Battery, Field Artillery, at Camp Taylor, Kentucky on June 27, 1918.  

After training through the summer of 1918, Junior was assigned to the 92nd Division’s 167th Field Artillery Brigade, the first artillery brigade composed entirely of African Americans ever organized in the world. The brigade had already begun its overseas mission in Montmarrillon, and Junior arrived in France on September 22, 1918. Five months after induction, Junior was now in The Shit.

Before leaving for France, the troops of the 92nd had selected the American buffalo for their insignia after the "Buffalo Soldier" nickname given to African-American cavalrymen by Native Americans in the 19th century. The troops wore the insignia on cloth patches sewn to their uniforms and after the war, Junior saved his patch between the pages of his books. Many years later, I found it, appropriately enough, in his copy of Karl Marx' Das Kapital. I still have both his book and the patch to this day. 

The 92nd Division was under the command of Brigadier General  Charles C. Ballou. There was apparently personal animosity between Ballou and General Robert Bullard, the commander of the American Second Army. Bullard was not only a staunch racist, but also had a personal rivalry with Ballou. In order to make both Ballou and the Black soldiers appear incompetent, Bullard spread misinformation about the successes and failures of the 92nd. Even Ballou’s own chief of staff, Colonel Allen J. Greer, was in on the plan to sabotage the reputation of his African-American unit and helped put a negative spin on stories from the front lines. Regardless of how well the 92nd Division actually did on the battlefield, it was virtually impossible to overcome the slander from prejudiced officers.

In contrast, Black soldiers in the 93rd Division had a very different experience. While the 92nd was attached to the racist General Bullard’s Second Army, which tolerated and even encouraged hostility toward Black troops and vehemently opposed placing them in combat, the 93rd actively fought alongside French troops. The 369th Infantry Regiment of the 93rd, a group of black National Guardsmen from Harlem, became the best-known regiment of Black soldiers to fight during the war. As famous for their military band as their tenacity on the battlefield, the “Harlem Hellfighters” and are celebrated to this day.

On September 20, 1918, two days before Junior arrived in France, the 92nd was ordered to proceed to the Argonne Forest in preparation for the Meuse-Argonne offensive. The Division reached the front lines just before the first assault and was ordered to fill a gap between American and French forces. However, despite some initial successes in Lorraine in mid-August, the infantry regiment was not successful in their assignment due to lack of training with the French, shortages of equipment, and unfamiliarity with the terrain. Their failure to accomplish the crucial mission blemished the 92nd’s combat record and was often used by military authorities for more than thirty years as evidence of the supposed inadequacy of African-American soldiers in combat.

After the disaster in the Argonne, morale was low when Junior joined up with the 92nd in France. The entire Division, including Junior and the artillery, was dispatched to Marbache, a relatively quiet area on the front. The mission, however, was a dangerous one: to harass the enemy with frequent patrols. Junior and the 167th Artillery Regiment soon distinguished themselves by their effective support of the 92nd’s infantry. 

By late 1918, the German Army was in full retreat. On November 9, Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated the throne and the crown prince, his eldest son, Friedrick Wilhelm, renounced the title. The next day, both Wilhelm and his son fled to Holland to escape widespread revolution throughout Germany.   

The Allied Commander in Chief, Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch, wanted to apply heavy pressure for a decisive breakthrough and final victory. On November 10, 1918, the 92nd launched an assault on the heights east of Champey in the French Alps. Although only lasting one day, the attack was fierce and bloody, costing the Division over 500 casualties. 

Junior’s Artillery Regiment supported the offensive with a rolling barrage that preceded the advancing troops. Brigadier General Malvern Hill Barnum of the 183rd Brigade praised the artillery, stating the barrages “were very well laid and proved effective.  It also rendered valuable work in placing heavy concentration fire on enemy strong points and machine gun nests. Its counter-battery work was excellent.”

At 7:18 am on November 11, 1918, the day after the Champey offensive, a telephone call to the front informed the commanders that an Armistice had been signed, effective 11:00 a.m., at which time all hostilities must cease. The World War was over.

Following the signing of the Armistice, the various units of the 92nd Division were gradually withdrawn from the front lines to back areas for rest and renovation. Junior arrived with his Division at Mayenne in northwestern France on the morning of Christmas Eve, 1918 and landed in Hoboken on February 24, 1919, over three months after Armistice Day. 

Junior was honorably discharged from the Army on April 9, 1919. Interestingly, when he was a Private being transferred from officer training at Camp Taylor to overseas action, his discharge form identified him as “colored.” However, his final discharge form, as a 2nd Lieutenant, identified him as “White.” In the backwards, racist minds of the segregated Armed Forces, promotion from Private to 2nd Lieutenant was probably considered less significant than his “promotion” from “colored” to “White.” 

As mentioned in previous posts, Junior had a light enough complexion that census workers variably classified him as “Negro,” “mulatto,” and “White,” and his education at Philips-Exeter and law school probably gave him the ability to talk and act “White.”  In short, he was a code switcher.  

And now, back in the United States as a World War I veteran, he had the paperwork saying he was White. He had become, quite literally, a card-carrying White man.

 

Day of the Bruise, 53rd of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Deneb): Day of the Bruise appropriately following Day of the Fall in keeping with old Angus MacLise's original sequence of names.

After all of the information overload I experienced yesterday at the cardiologist, I realized today that it's still not apparent to me if I can resume my alternating day walks or not. It's been 23 days since I've walked more than a John Adams,  25 since a J Quincy Adams. And mind-and-body being one, no alternating-day walks has meant no sitting meditation on the days in between.  

Cabin fever: I've fallen into a lethargy, a state almost approximating anhedonia. I'm not (yet) standing around staring vacantly into space (not that there's anything wrong with that), but walking and sitting had filled a sizable portion of my afternoons. Now, the morning routine of staring at screens - phone screens and computer screens - and the evening routine of gaming and television - which actually are just larger screens at which to stare - have increased in duration to fill the midday void. 

I need to start walking again to reengage my body into my life. Move your ass and your mind will follow, as they say. But one skill I've perfected in the last three weeks of inertia is procrastination, and I guess I probably shouldn't start walking again until I consult with the doctors, and since the weekend's here and I shouldn't expect to hear anything from them for another three days, I may as well resign myself to just continuing to loiter here around the house until I can get an answer.

 

Day of the Fall, 52nd of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Helios): Impermanence is swift. Today, I finally had my much-anticipated but long awaited appointment with a cardiologist. I'm gong to die, eventually, and heart disease is looking more and more likely to be the eventual cause, but I'm not at as imminent a risk as I had feared.

Overall, the doctor seemed nonplussed over my condition, but then he routinely sees far older patients in far worse health than I. In the waiting room, my 72-year-old ass felt like the fresh young thing. At lease I wasn't in a walker or whellchair.

No recommendation for immediate surgery (my worst fear), and my heart doesn't look to him like an overinflated balloon likely to pop at any second. He scheduled me for some non-invasive imaging to assess potential aortic blockage, but that won't be until the 60th Day of Hagwinter (December 30 to most of you). He doesn't need to see me again until next April. 

The long-term outlook seems to be that I can be treated with medication, not surgery. Depending on the results of  the imaging, he may change the medications, but for now he's keeping on the cocktail of drugs I'm taking every day now. 

As Syrio Forel told Arya Stark, "There is only one thing we say to Death: 'Not today.'"

In unrelated news, up to today I had always thought that PHP stood for "pot-head pixie."

The Frosted Cathedrals, 51st Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): The former Emma Trowbridge, my great-grandmother, and Silas Sr., my great-grandfather and soon to be Florida's "first Black banker," had one child, a son, and named him Silas, Jr. He was born on September 3, 1889 in Saint Augustine, Florida, and is my grandfather.  

Unique among African Americans in the late 19th Century Deep South, Silas and Emma were in a financial position to provide their son with an elite education.  They sent Junior to the Worcester Academy, a private school in Massachusetts and one of the country's oldest boarding schools. He eventually graduated from the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Both elite schools had been accepting African-Americans students from as far back as the Civil War.

Worcester and Phillips Exeter are some 1,200 miles from Florida.  By the turn of the century, the U.S. East Coast had a well-developed series of railroad tracks from city to city, and a voyage from Jacksonville to Exeter, New Hampshire, was manageable, although it probably would have taken days and involved several train changes.

One can imagine that a parent, either Silas or Emma, would have escorted Junior on at least the first trip, teaching him how to work the rail system, how to change trains, and so on. The trip must have included at least one overnight stay, either on a sleeper car or in a hotel or hostel near a station. 

On June 7, 1892, when Junior was but three years old, Homer Plessy bought a first-class ticket at the Press Street Depot in New Orleans and boarded a "Whites only" car on the East Louisiana Railroad bound for Covington, Louisiana. Plessy was of mixed race, seven-eighths White and one-eighth Black, but that one-eighth got him arrested. He fought the arrest all the way to the Supreme Court, but in 1896, the ultra-conservative, business-friendly court (sound familiar?) established in Plessy vs. Ferguson the concept of “separate but equal,” ruling that states could legally segregate races in public accommodations, such as railroad cars and public schools. 

The Plessy decision has never been explicitly overruled, and it wasn’t even successfully challenged until the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, reached (spoiler alert) five years before Junior died in 1959. Therefore, Junior’s life (1889-1959) was almost nearly congruent with the Jim Crow era, from Plessy (1896) to Brown (1954). 

In the racist, turn-of-the-century, Jim Crow South, the rules of segregation had to be carefully considered in planning a long-distance train trip. One can imagine Junior’s encounters along the route from Jacksonville to Exeter with “Whites only” railroad cars, restrooms, restaurants, and hotels; the scorn of white passengers annoyed by the presence of “coloreds” in their company during the trip; and the subtle and not-so-subtle threats of punishment or even violence if the young, Negro passenger didn’t properly observe all the rules of segregation during the long voyage.  The trip may have been as much a real-world education as anything in his schooling in New England. 

Considering how long the train ride from Jacksonville to Exeter took, the number of nights spent in hotels, the many transfers and fares, would it have been worthwhile for Junior to have come back home each year for Thanksgiving? For the Christmas holidays? We'll never know - such details aren't included in the historical documents, but I can't imagine him not coming home for summer vacations and a 1900 Census form confirms that an 11-year-old Junior was in Jacksonville at the time with his parents.

In any event, it’s apparent that he spent a lot of his childhood away from his mother and father and in the company of predominantly White classmates, schoolteachers and headmasters. One can imagine his sense of isolation and homesickness, and the psychological effects of his being “different” from his classmates and teachers.

Undoubtedly, he received a great education at Phillips Exeter. He learned math, science (such as it was then), geography, and the arts, and read the great books - I have his copy of Ben Hur, with the hand-written date February 27, 1902 inscribed on a fly page. He would have been 13 then.   

Human nature being what it is, he probably learned how to blend in and get along with the privileged White sons and daughters of the New England elite. His complexion was light enough that while some  Census takers classified him as “Black” or “mulatto,” later Censuses and Army paperwork listed him as “White.” At Phillips Exeter, he probably learned how to talk like the White students, how to walk like the White students, and how to play like the White students. In short, he probably learned to pass for White. 

His parents probably noticed a difference. Silas, Sr., born a slave on a plantation, must have been amused to see and hear his son returning home from school talking and acting like a White New Englander. One Christmas, when he was 16, his mother gave him a book of poetry by Paul Laurence Dunbar titled, Joggin' Erlong. Like his copy of Ben Hur, I have that book, too, and a hand-written inscription on the first page reads "Gift of Mama, Xmas, 1906.”

Joggin’ Erlong is lavishly illustrated with photographs by Leigh Richmond Miner depicting the lives of plantation slaves, and the poem are written in a cringe-inducing Black dialect that would generally be considered racist today ("De da'kest hour, they allus say, is des' befo' de dawn," etc.).  Although the poems frankly acknowledge the many hardships of slavery, the ultimate tone is redemptive - the power of faith and spirit to transcend suffering. I wonder if the book was selected as a reminder to Junior of his African-American heritage, lest he lose touch with his roots on the ivy-covered campus of Philips Exeter.  

After graduating from Exeter, Class of 1906, Junior entered Atlanta University (now Clark-Atlanta University). The Black student body of Atlanta University and the segregated, openly racist culture of Georgia must have been quite a shock for Junior after all those years at Philips Exeter. Light skinned and New England-educated, he probably stood out from his Atlanta U. classmates as much as he did when he first arrived at Worcester Academy.

Among other classes, he took Economics at Atlanta from its distinguished faculty member, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, founding member of the NAACP. His students reportedly considered Dr. Du Bois to be a brilliant teacher, although aloof and strict. However, Junior managed to cultivate a long relationship with him that lasted for many years beyond his student days.

In 1911, at age 22, Junior started classes in the University of Michigan's Department of Law, then known as "Detroit Law" and now part of Michigan State. 

Details are few, but while he was at Detroit Law, he apparently met a Mary Grayson of Windsor, Canada, "met" being a polite euphemism for "knocked up." On September 19, 1913, two weeks after his 24th birthday, Junior married Mary in Detroit.  She was 19 years old at the time of the wedding.  The marriage certificate, incidentally, lists them both as “White.”

It's unlikely that the marriage was part of either's long-term life plan, coming as it did while Junior was still in school.  They had a son, Silas III, born on February 12, 1914, five months after the wedding. But despite the distractions of marriage and premature fatherhood, Junior managed to graduate from the Detroit College of Law, Class of 1914. 

Little is known about Mary Grayson. The 1920 census found both Silas Jr. and Silas III, living in the Jacksonville of Silas Sr., but Mary is not listed among the residents. The scant documentation indicates that she died “before 1920,” impermanence is swift, but does not provide additional information on the cause or precise date of death. Sadly, it appears that Mary Grayson was not long for this world following the birth of her son.

The only son of a wealthy banker, a young widower with a son safely ensconced in the comfort of the family home, Junior had a promising career ahead of him in either law or the family banking business, or both. He was part of the emerging class of young Black entrepreneurs, but could also pass for White if he wanted. He probably could talk about the new jazz music emerging from New Orleans or about lacrosse with equal ease, and in whatever dialect and accent best served his purpose.  

And then on June 28, 1914, half a world away, Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian anarchist, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the crown prince of Austria. In retaliation, the Austro-Hungarian government declared war on Serbia and five days later, Russia mobilized its troops to defend Serbia. Within weeks, Germany declared war on Russia and France, Great Britain declared war on Germany, and even Japan jumped into the fray for some reason. Before one knew it, all the world, including the United States, was involved in The Great War, the War to End All Wars, and Junior received his draft notice to go serve his country.

 

Mysteries of the Sandman, 50th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Helios): In January of 1912, Joseph L. Wiley of the Fessenden Academy gave a speech in Tallahassee in celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation. The speech was "most excellent" according to the Ocala Observer and was printed in full in the New York Age, taking up four columns in the paper. 

Professor  Wiley focused on the opportunities of African Americans in the South and held out "hope and inspiration to the Negro race." Among the examples of "thrift, enterprise, and success" he cited was the Florida banker Silas Hart, who had been born a slave in 1860 on the Plantation at Cashua Creek in South Carolina. The Professor noted that Silas' net worth was then over $100,000 (about $3.5M today) and deserving of special mention. "He has made good,” the Professor noted. 

Abraham Lincoln was elected President the year Silas was born. That same year, the Pony Express completed its first run and the German chemist Albert Niemann invented cocaine. Charles Dickens published his first installment of Great Expectations and it was only a year earlier that Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. A month after Silas' birth, South Carolina seceded from the Union. 

During the ensuing Civil War, Silas lived as a slave for the first five years of his life until the defeat of the Confederacy and emancipation in 1865. His father, Eli, who had lived under slavery for 30 years, moved the family to LaVilla, a neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida as soon after emancipation as he could. He found work as a brick and stone mason, and Silas evidently joined his father in the family business. 

Following the highly contested election of 1877, Democrats agreed to concede the presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the withdrawal of all federal troops from the former Confederacy, and Reconstruction fell apart. Exploitative systems of convict leasing and sharecropping soon followed and returned many Black people to a status very similar to slavery. 

The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, ran an article in January 1942 by Samuel Harper titled, Negro Labor in Jacksonville. In the article, Harper states, “Back in 1886, Negro bricklayers labored hard and worked ten hours a day at the rate of twenty-five cents per hour.  They were very skillful at this trade."  The article goes on to note that among the bricklayers, one Silas Hart “rose from the scaffold to a foreman."  

Eventually, Silas rose above even the rank of foreman. With their black-majority populations, Jacksonville neighborhoods like LaVilla proved fertile grounds for minority office holding. According to Florida’s Black Public Officials, 1867-1924 (Canter Brown, Jr., 1998, University of Alabama Press), a minimum of forty-six African Americans served in local governments from at least 1870 to consolidation of the neighborhoods with Jacksonville in 1887.  Silas is listed in Brown’s book as one of the town clerks of LaVilla during the 1880s.

On December 2, 1886, at the age of 26, Silas  married Emma Louise Trowbridge of Augusta, Georgia, the daughter of Anna and Merritt Trowbridge. They had one son, Silas, Jr, born on September 3, 1889.  

Emma appears to have been a substantial woman in her own right.  In the book Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America, Francesca Morgan writes, “Led by Emma Trowbridge Hart of Jacksonville, Florida, black women launched a nationwide effort in early 1899 to fund a $25,000 monument ‘to the memory of the colored heroes’ of the Spanish-American War army, to be erected in some liberal city, ‘not Jacksonville.’”  

On October 6, 1902, Silas founded the Central Trust and Investment Company, becoming Jacksonville’s first Black banker. Silas served as president and cashier of the bank, which opened with only $800 in securities and $406 in cash. The bank was successful and by 1904 it held $20,000 ($695K in 2026 dollars) paid-in capital and had 500 depositors, twenty of whom were White. 

Central Trust had exchange relations with several large banks in New York City, and was the only institution south of Richmond, Virginia that had membership in the American Bankers' Association. The Jacksonville Evening Metropolis reported, “All of Florida knows that Central Trust and Investment Company is owned, manned, and managed wholly by colored men. From the start it has steadily gained the business confidence of the community, and among their long list of heavy depositors are many of the best and largest business men of both races in Jacksonville.”  

Silas and Emma’s affluence was such that they were able to afford a live-in servant, and also provide Silas, Jr., their only child, with an elite education. They sent him to the Worcester Academy, a private school in Massachusetts and one of the country's oldest boarding schools, and then to the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Both schools had accepted African-American students from as far back as the Civil War.

Capital Trust closed in 1926, three years before the stock market crash of 1929 that triggered the Great Depression, and all of its depositors received their money in full. 

Silas passed away at the age of 73 in 1933. 

Five years of slavery is an unfortunate start to life for any child, but Silas seems to have made the best of it. In the kind of rags-to-riches, Horatio-Alger story we don't often hear in real life, he was born a plantation slave, abandoned by Reconstruction, came of age in the Jim Crow South, and followed in his father’s footsteps in the ranks of the Jacksonville bricklayers. He made his way up through those ranks to foreman, was elected to public office, and created wealth as a trusted banker in the deeply prejudiced and segregated South. He provided a fist-class education for his son, and eventually sanctuary, safety, and comfort to a grandson in his Jacksonville home. 

In short, Silas, my great-grandfather, made good as Professor Wiley had put it.

 

The Painted Timbers, 49th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Electra): At the wedding reception, they asked a Zen monk to say a few words. He got up, raised a glass, and said, "May your grandparents die and may your parents die."

"May you die," he went on, "and may your children die. And may their children die." While the whole wedding party was shocked and aghast, the monk sat down with a big, self-satisfied grin on his face, as if thinking, "Nailed it!"

The father of the bride, fuming with anger, stood up and asked, "How dare you?"  He demanded to know what the monk meant by saying such things.

"Death is the inevitable result of life," the monk explained. "We mustn't forget that someday we all will die. But no parent should ever have to experience the death of their child, so the best outcome, the happiest thing, is for the elderly grandparents to die first, before the parents, and for the parents to die before their children. And then for those children to die before their children. That's the natural order of things. That's the best possible outcome, the kindest thing anyone can wish upon any family."

My father respected that natural order of things, dying in 2007 at age 75 before any of his children. And his father, Silas Jr., son of Silas Sr., son of Eli the former slave on Hannah Hart's Plantation at Cashua Creek, died in 1959 before my father did. And yes, Eli was the first to go (1894) and Silas Sr. left us in 1933. The natural order of things: great-great grandfather departing before great-grandfather; great- grandfather departing before grandfather, grandfather departing father, and father departing before his son. All things passing in the sequence that they should. Impermanence is swift. 

But my baby brother, ten years younger than I, messed it all up, dying young, age 60, in 2024, while our mother was still alive. Mom, to be sure, was 91 and pretty frail by then, living in a nursing home and bordering on dementia. We didn't have the heart to tell her that her youngest son had passed away; it would have broken her heart and possibly have killed her. In any event, she passed away four months later.

But it wasn't my mother who messed up the natural order by living too long. My baby brother died before I did, and while I was technically the same generation and not the parent, I still should have been the first to go. It was my birthright. He messed it up by departing this mortal coil way too soon. 

Then yesterday, my little sister, six years my junior, lost her year-long battle to cancer, further upsetting the natural order of things. 

There were six of us: my two parents and then me, followed by two sisters six and eight years later, and then my baby brother. There was another brother between me and my first sister who tragically died within days of birth - my mother's greatest heartbreak, and maybe the harbinger that the natural order wasn't going to apply to our family. 

Now it's just me and the one remaining sister, two little Indians left from the original six-pack of a family, and my ischemic heart is indicating that I'll most likely be the next to go.

As it should be. Impermanence is swift.

 

Descent of the Host, 48th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Deneb): Impermanence is swift. As you've heard, it's something I say when I hear or think about someone's passing. Some people incorrectly consider it a flippant, off-hand wise crack, sort of like Vonnegut's "So it goes," but to me it's sincere. It's a reminder that our time in this world is brief, our dew-like life easily disappears, and that we should appreciate and treasure every moment of our lives while we can.

Case in point: early this morning I got a telephone call informing me that my little sister lost her year-long battle with cancer last night. Impermanence is swift. She apparently passed in her sleep; her husband, who sleeps in a separate room because of snoring, found her lifeless body in the morning.

She underwent surgery for oral cancer in her cheek about a year ago and went through an extensive program of chemo-, radiation-, and immunotherapy for several months. Late last summer, the cancer came back despite the surgery and treatment, and took its final and ultimate toll at some time last evening.

Impermanence is swift. I talked to her quite a bit over the last year, trying to comfort her and console her as she went through her trials and tribulations, and acted as a sounding board to let her vent her frustrations and concerns. I'm glad that I was able to say "I love you" to her more times in the past year than I probably did in the past 20 years. Her husband told me that her final words were probably "love you" as she went to bed last night.

 

Day of the Inn Dweller, 47th of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Castor): Hi. White guy here. I don't have the energy today to write another long post about my African American ancestors or how five generations can transform a Black man into a White person - trust me, those posts each took a lot more research and time than you might imagine. Instead, before getting to the next generation (Eli and Henrietta's son, Silas), I wanted to clarify a bit more about me.

My grandfather, Silas Jr., died in 1959. I was five years old. I have no first-hand memories of him, and I can't conjure up any images of him in my mind. My father never spoke to me about him, and on the few occasions when my childlike curiosity caused me to ask about him, Dad just curtly told me he had an unhappy childhood and didn't want to talk about it. Both my Dad and my Mom would just shut me down and end any conversation on the topic almost immediately. 

"You want to know what an unhappy childhood is like?," Dad would ask, rhetorically. "I'll give you an unhappy childhood, starting with a week grounded in your room." That shut me up pretty quick and besides, children are only so curious about the lives of their parents before they were born, so that was pretty much the end of it.

Many years later, adolescence, I started leafing through some books Dad had from his father's library. There was a three-volume Webster's Dictionary with numerous newspaper clippings from the 1940s and '50s and other documents inserted between the pages, all scrapbooked by my grandfather. James Joyce's Ulysses and Karl Marx' Capital. Les Miserables and Ben Hur. I got curious again and once more started asking questions. 

Finally, one day in the early 1970s, my mother finally opened up to me and told me that Dad didn't want to talk about my grandfather because "he married a Black woman." She said it with contempt in her voice - how dare he? -  and didn't offer any more explanation. 

Frankly, I thought that was cool - pretty progressive for the 1950s or whenever. But I could understand my father, that product of a 1940's upbringing and education, being teased by friends and classmates ("your Dad married a . . .") and being embarrassed by the family secret. My parents were garden-variety, mainstream Democrats and I was raised to condemn racism - Martin Luther King, Jr. was good and George Wallace was bad. Our house was pro-civil rights, but not that we did very much about it. I was raised in lily-white, suburban Long Island towns and didn't have a non-white classmates in school until the eighth grade, and then it was like just a few Black students and a handful of Asians. My world was the whitest of whites. and Black people was something I'd only see on t.v., usually the news, or from the seat of my school bus during field trips to the Big City.

And that would have been the end of the story. Could have been. Other than some interesting books and a family anecdote about a grandfather who ran off to marry a Black woman, that would have been the extent of my knowledge. But during the pandemic, as many other people did, I cast about looking for new hobbies and pastimes to fill the lockdown days. Rather than taking up sourdough baking or learning a new language, I bought a three-month membership to ancestry.com and started researching my roots.  

As I went through marriage certificates and dates, I learned that my grandfather, Silas Jr., didn't remarry after leaving my grandfather. In fact, they never split at all - they're together still, to this day, buried side by side in a graveyard on Long Island. But he had married a Black woman, twice as a matter of fact, not after but before marrying my grandmother, his third wife. And then I learned what should have been the most obvious thing in the world but was completely outside my expectations, and that was that the previous marriages weren't progressive acts of racial equanimity at all, but Grandfather himself was Black.

Google yielded a newspaper article about him headlined "Negro WW I Vet to Bring Voting Rights Case to Florida Supreme Court" (he was an attorney). It took a lot of confirmation to convince me the WW I vet in question was indeed my grandfather and not someone else with the same name. And then I found his draft registration and Army induction papers through ancestry, and sure enough, on the line asking for race, the entry was "Negro." The date and place of birth confirmed he was the same man buried next to my grandmother.

I found correspondence between him and W.E.B. DuBois and with Father Divine.

I had lived a lie, although my parents may not have literally lied to me. They never once said, "you're White" or "your grandfather wasn't Black," but who says obvious, self-evident things like that? However, they raised me in an overwhelmingly, almost suffocating, world of whiteness and never once even hinted that my heritage was far more interesting and diverse than I had imagined it to be. By the time of my Covid-era discovery, Dad had already passed away (impermanence is swift) and Mom was becoming increasingly senile, and I could get no explanation or further information from her. She's since passed on as well (impermanence is swift), as had any aunts or uncles who might have some more first-hand information. I'm left to trace the breadcrumbs of Census records, birth, death, and marriage certificates, and random newspaper articles to piece it all together.

I'm angry at my parents for withholding the truth. But in their defense, I don't think it was racism, or at least not explicit racism, that kept them from sharing. My Dad, who grew up through the Great Depression and WWII, probably did have an unhappy childhood, and I'm sure his Dad, Silas Jr., experienced discrimination and bigotry, some of which directly contributed to my father's bad fortunes. I can easily imagine that in those Jim Crow, segregated times, the world of blackness seemed bleak, impoverished, and miserable to Dad, while the world of whiteness seemed bright, affluent, and happy. 

Like any parent, he wanted the best for his children, and so tried to shield, to protect, us from the world of blackness. Wrong-headed and prejudiced? You betcha. But based on racial animosity? Not in its ugliest, most virulent form. I know that's setting the bar pretty low - he wasn't Lester Maddux-racist - but Kennedy Democrats that they were, they taught me to sympathize and respect civil-rights protesters, to never engage in ethnic stereotyping, and that racism, in a word, was bad. 

Blackness was fine, but just, you know, not in our house. So I was taught. 

Fuck that.